Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215565 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A firsthand depiction of the hardships and rewards of medical school, this sensitive memoir may serve as a guide to help readers who are considering traversing that same path. Young's schooling taught her that "everything important comes from the patient's story." She predicates her perceptive memoir on just this lesson, as she exposes the unique life of a physician-to-be and the human chronicle behind the diseases she struggles to treat. Young's narrative takes the reader through her medical school rotations, where she describes such events as the helicopter evacuation of a dying man from an Eskimo village in Aniak, Alaska; her own near-fainting during a childbirth in Spokane, Washington; and the death of a Pocatello, Idaho, baby born with a rare disease. Young dissects the histories of these patients-almost all poor and mostly from rural settings-and reveals not only their medical dilemmas, but their personal and socioeconomic ones. Despite her sometimes over-earnest tone and the use of some medical terminology, most of her reflections are poignant, such as when she describes her "resigned solitude" amidst 36-hour, sleep-deprived shifts. Still, her medical accounts are the memoir's true highlights, and her stint through AIDS-ravished Swaziland offers the most captivating and heartbreaking chapter, providing a glimpse of the state of health in that Third World African country, and its disturbing implications for humanity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
People are drawn to the medical profession for a plethora of reasons that usually have something to do with curing the sick or making sweeping social changes that enable individuals to enjoy better health and have improved access to medical care. Young confesses that her own motivation borrowed on all these themes. As she began medical school, she envisioned herself one day working in a big city's tough inner core, a champion of medical aid to the urban poor. The University of Washington Medical School, however, held a different promise for the idealistic medical hopeful. Young became involved in the school's rural internship program, which sent her to the remotest reaches of Alaska, Wyoming, and even South Africa. She candidly shares how reality collided with naive expectations when a chronically ill patient selected job over health, when she could only watch helplessly while a man died, and when she had to conduct wartime triage in a vain attempt to stretch an insufficient supply of pharmaceuticals. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The human element in medicine
In "What Patients Taught Me," author Audrey Young, M.D. describes her path in the study of medicine. Growing up in a comfortable Seattle household, she became interested in socioeconomic justice. As an undergrad at Berkeley she "wanted to be an urban doctor for neglected populations."

She chose the University of Washington Medical School, an institution with a " ... dispersed ... program to train medical students from the Pacific Northwest to practice as rural doctors." Under this program, called WWAMI for its presence in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, Young's medical school rotations provided an unusual amount of patient contact and responsibility.

It was her choice to spend the first year in a Seattle rotation, where she had limited patient contact while taking a heavy academic load. The following summer she began her rural training in a family practice clinic in Bethel, Alaska, where huge distances and inaccessibility of care often led to delayed treatment.

Here on the tundra, as Young learned to present a case in pertinent bullet points, she began to see the context in which patients live their lives. From a healthy youngster with a cold, to a mother with a fulminating post-partum infection, to a forty-year-old mechanic with tuberculosis, each patient was so much more than symptoms and test results.

After Alaska, Young's rotations were a mix of urban and rural. Seattle for surgery and psychiatry; Spokane for obstetrics; Pocatello, Idaho for pediatrics; back to Seattle for internal medicine where she began to long for the autonomy and open spaces of more rural rotations.

At the end of her third year Young took a difficult rotation in Swaziland, in eastern Africa. This third-world country was overrun with HIV and suffered acutely from interruptions to the supply chain due to war, poverty and political ideology.

What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Student's Journey is illustrated with story after story of patients and their diseases and social context. This is the lesson Audrey Young shares with us -- "that a doctor should understand how people live." She tells her own story beautifully, and it's an inspiring story regardless of the reader's field of interest. I would paraphrase her life lesson and say that in all our interactions, any person should strive for that same understanding.

There is a lot of medical detail in this memoir, but if that field is within your area of competency as a reader, I recommend this book to you.

Linda Bulger, 2008

Great book
If you are in the medical field you need to read this book. It's great to see someone who is in the medical field for the people and not the money.

If you don't pick something up from this book as to how to handle your patients, I'd be real surprised.

Inspirational
After reading the author's accounts of rural medicine, I've begun to strongly consider applying for a rural-based residency upon completion of medical school.

Her tone isn't as pompous as some other similar books I've read. She's very down to earth, and doesn't try to make herself sound impressive by using jargon and fancy words. I've already recommended it for friends who are looking into going into medicine. A friend gave this book to me as a gift after reading it, and I plan on doing the same!