Equal Partners: A Physician's Call for a New Spirit of Medicine

Advocating changes in the practice of modern medicine that will foster cooperation and compassion between physician and patient, a young doctor tells how her serious illness shortly after leaving medical school forced her to reevaluate contemporary medical care. Tour.

What happens when a doctor is admitted to the hospital with a serious condition? For Heymann, an intern and a graduate of both the Harvard Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government, it was a harrowing yet vastly enlightening experience. Heymann was placed in neurological intensive care after a seizure; thus began her year and a half as both doctor and patient, as well as parent, chronicled in this spirited account. It is a critique of present doctor-patient relationships and a call for changes in medical education to sensitize future physicians to their patients' concerns as well as to their ailments. As a patient excluded from medical decisions affecting her own case, even misdiagnosed and callously treated, Heymann speaks candidly of her vulnerability. As a physician, she urges fundamental changes in medical practice so that "doctors would be trained and allowed time to share understanding and decision making with patients."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After graduating from medical school, Heymann was struck with a seizure and a brain tumor. This calamity is the basis for a harrowing but ultimately riveting medical tale in which Heymann was both a patient and a doctor. A Harvard faculty member, MacArthur Fellow, wife, and mother of two children, Heymann recounts how she juggled some of these projects simultaneously while struggling with severe neurological problems and completing her pediatric medical residency. From her patient's perspective, Heymann learned firsthand of shortcomings in the medical establishment. Consequently, she argues strongly for the introduction into medical practice of a new spirit in which patients and their families are truly included as equal partners in their own healthcare. She also discusses her recent work with Guatemalan refugees, which demonstrates her social conscience but clouds the main theme of her work. Heymann is best when describing her role as patient and the medical outcomes of her case. For both general and informed readers.
James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As a physician with a Ph.D. in public policy, Heymann has had practical experience in the U.S. and Mexico. As a patient, she has epilepsy and has had Guillain-Barr{{‚}e}E syndrome, a major brain hemorrhage, and some minor problems. Her human and rational brief for better physician understanding of patients and the need for physician and patient to work together deals not with exceptional transgressions in this relationship but with daily, uncaring insults. She uses her own experiences as the main thread in her at times almost unbelievable account but also draws on friends and her own patients to make not a sensational assault on medical education and practice but an on-the-scene picture of what can go wrong, why it does, and what can be done to improve conditions. Heymann is a practical optimist who makes both general and specific recommendations worth the attention of every medical student starting junior year, every director of medical education, every library serving discussion groups, and every patient, future patient, and friend of a patient. William Beatty