The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics [Kindle Edition]
Author: Barron H. Lerner | Language: English | ISBN: B00GQA28MG | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics
Download electronic versions of selected books The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link The story of two doctors, a father and son, who practiced in very different times and the evolution of the ethics that profoundly influence health care
As a practicing physician and longtime member of his hospital’s ethics committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s, his father, an infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he had physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who had stopped breathing, preventing his colleagues from performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even though CPR was the ethically and legally accepted thing to do. Over the next few years, the senior Dr. Lerner tried to speed the deaths of his seriously ill mother and mother-in-law to spare them further suffering.
These stories angered and alarmed the younger Dr. Lerner—an internist, historian of medicine, and bioethicist—who had rejected physician-based paternalism in favor of informed consent and patient autonomy. The Good Doctor is a fascinating and moving account of how Dr. Lerner came to terms with two very different images of his father: a revered clinician, teacher, and researcher who always put his patients first, but also a physician willing to “play God,” opposing the very revolution in patients' rights that his son was studying and teaching to his own medical students.
But the elder Dr. Lerner’s journals, which he had kept for decades, showed the son how the father’s outdated paternalism had grown out of a fierce devotion to patient-centered medicine, which was rapidly disappearing. And they raised questions: Are paternalistic doctors just relics, or should their expertise be used to overrule patients and families that make ill-advised choices? Does the growing use of personalized medicine—in which specific interventions may be best for specific patients—change the calculus between autonomy and paternalism? And how can we best use technologies that were invented to save lives but now too often prolong death? In an era of high-technology medicine, spiraling costs, and health-care reform, these questions could not be more relevant.
As his father slowly died of Parkinson’s disease, Barron Lerner faced these questions both personally and professionally. He found himself being pulled into his dad’s medical care, even though he had criticized his father for making medical decisions for his relatives. Did playing God—at least in some situations—actually make sense? Did doctors sometimes “know best”?
A timely and compelling story of one family’s engagement with medicine over the last half century, The Good Doctor is an important book for those who treat illness—and those who struggle to overcome it. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics [Kindle Edition]
Download electronic versions of selected books The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link The story of two doctors, a father and son, who practiced in very different times and the evolution of the ethics that profoundly influence health care
As a practicing physician and longtime member of his hospital’s ethics committee, Dr. Barron Lerner thought he had heard it all. But in the mid-1990s, his father, an infectious diseases physician, told him a stunning story: he had physically placed his body over an end-stage patient who had stopped breathing, preventing his colleagues from performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, even though CPR was the ethically and legally accepted thing to do. Over the next few years, the senior Dr. Lerner tried to speed the deaths of his seriously ill mother and mother-in-law to spare them further suffering.
These stories angered and alarmed the younger Dr. Lerner—an internist, historian of medicine, and bioethicist—who had rejected physician-based paternalism in favor of informed consent and patient autonomy. The Good Doctor is a fascinating and moving account of how Dr. Lerner came to terms with two very different images of his father: a revered clinician, teacher, and researcher who always put his patients first, but also a physician willing to “play God,” opposing the very revolution in patients' rights that his son was studying and teaching to his own medical students.
But the elder Dr. Lerner’s journals, which he had kept for decades, showed the son how the father’s outdated paternalism had grown out of a fierce devotion to patient-centered medicine, which was rapidly disappearing. And they raised questions: Are paternalistic doctors just relics, or should their expertise be used to overrule patients and families that make ill-advised choices? Does the growing use of personalized medicine—in which specific interventions may be best for specific patients—change the calculus between autonomy and paternalism? And how can we best use technologies that were invented to save lives but now too often prolong death? In an era of high-technology medicine, spiraling costs, and health-care reform, these questions could not be more relevant.
As his father slowly died of Parkinson’s disease, Barron Lerner faced these questions both personally and professionally. He found himself being pulled into his dad’s medical care, even though he had criticized his father for making medical decisions for his relatives. Did playing God—at least in some situations—actually make sense? Did doctors sometimes “know best”?
A timely and compelling story of one family’s engagement with medicine over the last half century, The Good Doctor is an important book for those who treat illness—and those who struggle to overcome it. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 954 KB
- Print Length: 241 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0807033405
- Publisher: Beacon Press (May 13, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GQA28MG
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,913 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Physician & Patient > Medical Ethics
- #36 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Doctor-Patient Relations
- #42 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Medical Ethics
After hearing Barron Lerner give a lecture on this subject in 2013, I had been eagerly awaiting the publication of his book. It did not disappoint. Anyone looking for easy answers to the complex ethical questions raised in the book will go away unsatisfied. Rather, what the book does is present these questions in a deeply personal light and in a way that is tractable to the lay person. As such, the reader is left with the context to explore questions which, whether doctor or patient (or both), ultimately impact all of us.
Lerner details his own career in medicine and that of his father, Phil Lerner. The two have much in common: both became accomplished physicians who eschewed the more conventional path of a private practice, both were dedicated to their patients, and both focused on delivering the best medical care possible while engaging in research to advance the medical field. The differences in their careers largely derive from the different historical contexts in which they were trained and in which they practiced medicine. The elder Dr. Lerner practiced in the paternalistic era of medicine in which “doctors knew best”, routinely withheld information from their patients, and made unilateral treatment decisions on behalf of those patients. His son became a doctor in a different era, when the doctor-patient relationship was evolving to one in which patients are now more informed about and involved in decisions related to their care.
The differences in their careers would make for an interesting story by itself. What makes this book so compelling is that studying and understanding those differences within the larger practice of medicine has been a focus of Barron Lerner’s career as a physician, medical historian and bioethicist.
Barron H. Lerner's "The Good Doctor" is the author's account of his ambivalent relationship with his father, Phillip, a dedicated medical practitioner, teacher, and infectious disease specialist. In this poignant and candid memoir, Lerner traces his family's roots to Poland. Most of Barron's ancestors came to America before the Holocaust, and once here, they found jobs, established homes, raised families, and worked hard so that their children could succeed in life. Phillip, who was born in Cleveland in 1932, became a brilliant and dedicated physician. He spent countless hours on call, and was usually available whenever a patient or colleague sought his advice.
Dr. Phillip Lerner even provided treatment to his sick relatives. Barron, a highly respected doctor himself, as well as a medical historian and ethicist, insists that it is a conflict of interest for a doctor to treat his loved ones. Nevertheless, Barron's dad thought that he knew best. He was a proponent of "paternalistic" medicine, asserting that it is acceptable for doctors to care for their grandparents, aunts, and cousins. Under certain circumstances, he withheld information from patients about their prognosis and, furthermore, he considered it his duty to help terminally ill patients pass away peacefully.
This is a colorful portrait of an extended family and a close look at the career of a healer who enjoyed what he did until "cookbook medicine," high-tech tests, managed care, and advance medical directives became commonplace. Barron and his father differed on a number of issues. For example, the younger Dr. Lerner is a champion of informed consent and insists that, whenever possible, physicians should confer with their patients and/or next of kin about their medical options.
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