A Literary Medical Crisis

a 2024 release I completely missed but will never forget

Hello readers! Today is a whole newsletter about a recent read that I can only hope will live in my brain for all of my days. I will charge no rent. It’s a keeper.

Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash

Anyone who has followed my reviews over the years knows that I can't get enough when it comes to reading about the human side of medicine, both fiction and nonfiction. Stories of doctors and hospitals and the healthcare insurance industry, patients and labyrinthian paperwork. I can't speak to exactly why ~ maybe to try to gain a semblance of control (via knowledge) over something (health) I have absolutely no control over?

Maybe I am trying to understand something that seems mystifying to me ~ the act of practicing medicine, but also the way many patients (including myself) are treated by all actors in the healthcare industry. By reading about doctors and nurses, I can perhaps understand why they behave the way they do, why they make the decisions they do, why they treat people the various ways they do. By reading about patients, I can understand different ways they are treated, what patient behaviors trigger different healthcare professional behavior.

I work in an industry nowhere near healthcare and access healthcare as little as I possibly can. I have a deep distrust of the insurance industry and the mechanisms used to make the healthcare industry treacherous in the United States for patients and providers alike.