ER: Enter at Your Own Risk: How to Avoid Dangers Inside Emergency Rooms

by Joel Cohen

Book Overview

ER doctor Joel Cohen teaches how to be your own health care advocate, how to decide when and where to seek emergency care and how to prepare ahead for sudden illness or injury before it happens. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0882822055
• ISBN13: 9780882822051
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: New Horizon Press
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

What to do in the Emergency Room

I was glad to find out about this book from a Parade magazine review. I've heard some real scary stories from friends about their emergency room experiences. This book tells how to get the best care possible in the ER and what to do to protect yourself from mistakes, long waits, and other ER problems. For anything life threatening, call for an ambulance as you are likely to get attention faster when you arrive at the ER. For a cough, any chronic condition, really push your regular doctor to squeeze you in. That's better than sitting around for hours being exposed to flu and diseases in the ER waiting room. Don't go alone, as you need someone to be an advocate for you. Their help can make a difference, since you aren't in the best of shape to fight for good care.

Take it from an ER doc: this is a book you must read!

If you're like most Americans, it won't be long until either you or someone you love becomes a patient in an emergency room. And, if you're like most Americans, you will blindly trust the doctors and other ER personnel to provide optimal care. That might be a reasonable expectation in a perfect world, but we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world in which the quality of emergency care is considerably variable from one hospital to another and from one practitioner to another and even from one minute to another. Are you willing to cross your fingers and hope that everything goes well?Fortunately, you need not leave your fate to chance. If you follow the advice given by Dr. Cohen, you can become an intelligent participant in your care and proactively take steps to reduce a myriad number of risks, any one of which may put you at increased risk of death or disability. Or you can play the blame game, in which you or your survivors point fingers in a courtroom. That's great for lawyers, but is it good for you? Obviously not, if health means more to you than money. Malpractice attorneys like to justify their existence by believing that they're performing a useful public service: namely, punishing doctors for real or imagined errors and thereby enhancing the quality of medical care. In theory, that sounds great. In reality, that system just isn't effective.If everyone read and followed the advice in this book, Dr. Cohen would do far more to enhance the delivery of first-rate emergency healthcare than every malpractice attorney in this country. Collectively, Dr. Cohen's advice could save billions of dollars and an untold number of tragedies. I don't know of any other book that offers so many helpful ER tips. If you don't read this book, some day you will probably wish you did. Even though I'm an ER doc, I learned some helpful things from Dr. Cohen. His splendid advice could help so many people in so many ways. Do yourself a favor, and read this book.Review by Kevin Pezzi, M.D., author of "Believe It or Not! True Emergency Room Stories."

A welcome and invaluable compendium of sound advice

Hospital emergency rooms are typically understaffed, overstuffed, and manned with inexperienced doctors and nurses rendering them potentially hazardous to patients. This is the persuasively argued premise of Dr. Joel Cohen's ER: Enter At Your Own Risk. Dr. Cohen goes on to recommend a solid plain of action to avoid real and perceived dangers inside contemporary hospital emergency rooms that will enable non-specialist general readers on how to get treated by experts rather than the inept; how to provide children with the best care; and how to decide when and where to seek emergency professional care. ER is a welcome and invaluable compendium of sound advice in dealing with doctors and medical personnel on call so that when an emergency strikes, they will have all the facts and strategies in hand for being healed and not harmed in a hospital emergency room environment.