WWWWF:Is This Chapter Ever Going to End?!
Snail's-pace narrative and meticulous details make for rough reading
Up until this point, "How Doctors Think" has been a fairly enjoyable, interesting read with a lot of cool insights and tips for patients and physicians alike.
Things seem to have ground to a halt by Chapter 8.
The detailed description of medical community life is there, as Groopman plunges into the world of radiology and the pitfalls of gestalt reasoning.
And the scary insights and sobering stats are also present.
One film of the sixty was of a patient who was missing his left clavicle. Presenting such a chest x-ray was meant to assess performance in noticing what was not on the film rather than merely searching for a positive finding -- an exercise that points out our natural preference for focusing on positive data and ignoring the negative, as James Lock emphasized. Remarkably, 60 percent of the radiologists failed to identify the missing clavicle.
But the narrative seems to have flown by the wayside. As he delves deeper and deeper into medical terminology and pschoanalysis behind the mistakes being made, the chapter just loses steam. You can only read about CT scans, anterior cruciate ligaments and "interobserer variability" so many times before you start to shut stuff out.