How Doctors Think

"Must reading for every physician who cares for patients and every patient who wishes to get the best care." —Time magazine

From Dr. Jerome Groopman, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS, a groundbreaking, profound view of twenty-first-century medical decision-making, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this revolutionary book, Dr. Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make, offering direct, intelligent questions for patient advocacy to help them get back on track. Drawing on extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors and Groopman's own experiences as a doctor and as a patient, How Doctors Think reveals an important approach to twenty-first-century medical practice, improving doctor-patient communication and giving doctors and patients a way to make better judgments together.

This revolutionary book reveals the hidden psychology of medicine and gives you the tools to:

• Cognitive Errors in Medicine: Learn to recognize the hidden biases, cognitive traps, and thought processes that can lead to misdiagnosis, drawn from candid interviews with the nation’s top physicians.
• A Patient Advocacy Toolkit: Discover the direct, intelligent questions you can ask to improve communication, partner with your doctor, and ensure you get the best care.
• The Psychology of Medical Judgment: Understand why a physician interrupts a patient within eighteen seconds and how those snap judgments, while often correct, can sometimes have catastrophic consequences.
• Firsthand Medical Insights: Go behind the scenes with Dr. Groopman's own experiences as both a doctor and a patient, revealing a clear path for making better, more informed judgments together.

Jerome Groopman, M.D. is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,The Washington Post and The New Republic. He is author of The Measure of Our Days (1997), Second Opinions (2000), Anatomy of Hope (2004), How Doctors Think (2007), and the recently released, Your Medical Mind.