Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How Patients, Families, and Physicians Can Cope with Uncertainty

by H. Bursztajn

Written for both patients and physicians, this book suggests that medical decision-making should be a shared responsibility between doctor and patient. The authors expound the view that the medical profession should accept uncertainty and recognize that feelings are a concern of science.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415902924
• ISBN13: 9780415902922
• Release Date: December 1990
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 454 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Medical truth and consequences often ignored

Why or why not submit to (techincal) battery in the name of better health? Because intervention always works? Because we patients deeply want to believe intervention will help? Because providers want us to believe it will help? Because it's faster? Because it's better?This book lays out the pieces of medical choice-making in the context of the probabilities that underlie all desision making. It suggests that principled gambling is seminal to medical choices and makes suggestions, via numerous clinical vignettes, of how medical practice needs to change so that patients and practitioners can make better choices rather than those based on blind faith, short-term clinical efficiency, and shamanistic egos.In short, this book deconstructs the mechanistic (know-it-all) paradigm of medical practice and replaces it with a probabilistic (don't know it all) paradigm that would, in most cases, be fairer and kinder to all.Medicine would be a better place if the suggestions in this book were adopted.