From a young age we are taught to seek guidance from those who are more knowledgeable than ourselves. Doctors, surgeons, and nurses have all been educated in their specific fields, but this doesn’t always make them experts. Over the past five years, Theresa Errante-Parrino has dealt with cancer. Here she records her breast cancer story, sharing behind-the-scenes details of her personal experiences. From dealing with difficult doctors to adjusting to a new lifestyle and new routines, the author gives insight into what having cancer is really like. Having learned from her own trials, Errante-Parrino hopes to encourage others to take control of their medical situations as their own advocate, speaking out when they believe something isn’t going to help them. With formal medical training as a certified medical assistant, pharmacy technician, paramedic, and X-ray technician, Theresa has the knowledge to recognize when medical conclusions are not truthful or correct. Educate yourself and raise your voice, because no one knows your body like you do.

Almost 20 billion times each year, a person walks into a doctor's office. The person becomes a patient. Everyone becomes this patient at some point. How will you talk to your physicians? What will you tell them? What will they tell you in return? They can't tell you what they don't know. They can tell you when they don't know. Will they? What Doctors Cannot Tell You explores the uncertainty that pervades medicine. It breaks the code of silence within which too many physician-patient conversations take place. The patients' stories in its pages will empower you to ask questions of your physicians, with a firm belief that healing and hope begin from honesty in those critical conversations. This book marries surgically precise medical narrative to thinking and perspective that will throw the curtains wide on what medicine knows, what it doesn't know, and how it tries to tell the difference between the two. This book is Outliers meets Patch Adams, only with an added how-to twist beyond the instructive and powerfully human narratives. At every chapter's end, the reader will find a list of principles, one for each vignette, and questions to ask his or her physician. A few books in the last decade have focused on human errors and complications in medicine. Each has suggested ways to improve medicine by the application of checklists and protocols. This book adds a unique and important angle to these considerations: How firmly do we know what should go on the checklist or protocol in the first place? How clear has medicine been with its patients about what it cannot know or does not yet know?

What Doctors Cannot Tell You explores the uncertainty that pervades medicine. It breaks the code of silence within which too many physician-patient conversations take place. The patients' stories in its pages will empower you to ask questions of your physicians, with a firm belief that healing and hope begin from honesty in those critical conversations. This book marries surgically precise medical narrative to thinking and perspective that will throw the curtains wide on what medicine knows, what it doesn't know, and how it tries to tell the difference between the two.

For many doctors, their role as powerful healer precludes thoughts of ever getting sick themselves. When they do, it initiates a profound shift of awareness-- not only in their sense of their selves, which is invariably bound up with the "invincible doctor" role, but in the way that they view their patients and the doctor-patient relationship. While some books have been written from first-person perspectives on doctors who get sick-- by Oliver Sacks among them-- and TV shows like "House" touch on the topic, never has there been a "systematic, integrated look" at what the experience is like for doctors who get sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of becoming ill. The psychiatrist Robert Klitzman here weaves together gripping first-person accounts of the experience of doctors who fall ill and see the other side of the coin, as a patient. The accounts reveal how dramatic this transformation can be-- a spiritual journey for some, a radical change of identity for others, and for some a new way of looking at the risks and benefits of treatment options. For most however it forever changes the way they treat their own patients. These questions are important not just on a human interest level, but for what they teach us about medicine in America today. While medical technology advances, the health care system itself has become more complex and frustrating, and physician-patient trust is at an all-time low. The experiences offered here are unique resource that point the way to a more humane future.

Confessions of a Professional Hospital Patient is a humorous first person account of how to survive a hospital stay and escape with your life, dignity and sense of humor. The book, written with the insight worthy of a physician but from a patient's perspective, relates the TRUE goings on in hospitals and medical care today. Through Mr. Weiss' sharing of his most intimate, embarrassing and funny experiences, the book takes you through chapter upon chapter of useful nuggets of information on such important topics as preparing for the hospital stay, coping with nurses in the middle of the night, communicating with doctors, getting treated in the emergency room, creating privacy and dignity in the often demeaning hospital setting, dealing with the pain and setbacks associated with recuperation/rehabilitation and pursuing payment/reimbursement from bureaucratic managed care companies. In addition to the book being a very useful source of practical information for prospective hospital patients and their families, it is unique in its blend of humor and candor in addressing a delicate and uncomfortable topic. As a bonus, Mr. Weiss' personal story is truly inspiring and the manner in which he conveys his experiences is entertaining, funny and poignant.

Have you ever wondered what is going on inside your doctor's head when you're behind that closed examination room door? Practice Makes Perfect: How One Doctor Found the Meaning of Lives helps us to understand the potential depth, sanctity, and humor within the doctor-patient relationship from both perspectives, as Dr. David Roberts makes rounds and cares for patients.Dr. Roberts has just completed his medical training and starts out in the private practice of Internal Medicine in a Midwestern college town. He is twenty-nine years old, but looks sixteen, inspiring most patients to comment, “You look too young to be a doctor!” On his first week of hospital rounds, an angry middle-aged man dies in such a dramatic, direct manner that our doctor, and the young nurse working with him, believe he has killed this patient. From this point onward, we listen and learn with Dr. Roberts and Dr. Mark Edwards, his senior partner, as they together navigate their first five years of private practice as primary care physicians. Written in the currently popular narrative non-fiction style, throughout Practice Makes Perfect the reader follows Dr. Roberts as he cares for twenty different and unique patients. As he encounters each new human being seeking help, we are invited inside the good physician's head to see and better understand the complexity of both successful and strained patient-doctor relationships. The reader sees him quickly formulate his initial impressions, analyze the data, argue with himself and sometimes others, including his patients, and struggle with his own doubts and certainties in order to help his patients to heal.Through a series of fascinating, humorous, and poignant patient stories, this “professional coming of age” book chronicles Dr. Robert's journey of finding the human dignity in each patient and learning something about himself, to a growing confidence in his abilities as a physician. Using a lively and entertaining style, the author takes us inside his own mind to help us understand what doctors think, say and do, (and what they don't say or do), each time we walk into the examination room as patients seeking help for our maladies.We see Doctor Roberts honestly reflect upon his own failures, successes, doubts and certainties, to learn the truth that his patients have to teach him about life. In discovering each person's innate dignity, he finds his own true calling as a physician and healer.Each chapter begins with an epigraph, setting the stage for the patient story. In addition to meeting and learning from each patient, the reader also follows the growth and development of the fledgling practice from the first two physicians, Drs. Edwards and Roberts, to the addition of new partners, until they at last outgrow their small office and move to a new professional office building adjacent to their hospital. Recognized as one of America's Best Doctors for many years, the author's broad experiences as a practicing physician, a hospital and medical group executive, and national speaker allow him to paint an exciting and heartrending portrait of our healthcare system, and help the reader to find his or her place within it.You simply cannot listen to the news these days without hearing about what is wrong with healthcare. In stark contrast, seeing patients with Dr. Roberts helps us understand both what is right, and what could be better, about ourselves and our relationships with physicians, as we seek and then discover with him the dignity of each human spirit.