Second Opinions

The acclaimed doctor and author of the best-selling The Measure of Our Days---who writes "beautifully, tenderly, truthfully" (Oliver Sacks)--explores the art and science of decision-making in today's complex medical universe.

Jerome Groopman, an eminent clinician and researcher at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, explored the spiritual dimension of illness in his highly praised The Measure of Our Days. In Second Opinions, he focuses on the greatest challenge that patients and their families face--how to evaluate and act on medical advice.

Told in eight gripping clinical dramas, linked by Groopman's unique insider's vantage point, Second Opinions is a book that reveals the forces at play--from the realities of medical politics to the importance of patient intuition--in making critical medical decisions. As we accompany Groopman, we witness him and his wife as anxious young parents of an infant near-fatally misdiagnosed; a family trapped by an HMO's rote plan about what seemed like routine asthma; and doctors' conflicts over a patient with no clear diagnosis--a case where non-intervention turned out to be the wise, lifesaving choice. An extraordinary reading experience, Second Opinions takes us into the complex and ever-changing world of medicine where knowledge is imperfect, no therapy is without risks, no prognosis fully predictable. Readers will come away with a profoundly changed perspective and a new ability to make medical choices, from a doctor Publishers Weekly said writes "with the eye of a poet, the heart of a philosopher, and the voice of a novelist."