Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country's best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can-with our help-avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong-with catastrophic consequences. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country's best physicians, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking, offering direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. He explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can with our help avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can have a profound impact on our health.

Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong with catastrophic consequences. On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within twelve seconds.

A New Yorker staff writer, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the ultimate medical mystery: how doctors figure out the best treatments or fail to do so.

How doctors think by jerome groopman md