- Book Recommendations for Future -
Health Care Professionals
By Rhea Chowdhury
Often when it comes to students who are in a STEM-related field, such as the health sciences, they find themselves clinging onto science and cringing at the humanities. This can turn out to be inefficient, ineffective, and ultimately inhibitive for future health care professionals. When working in a field that involves direct contact with patients, you need to remember that they are people first, and people often share universal themes that are explained or best represented through the humanities. Taking the time to be able to read literature, or watch a film or play and be able to analyze it or find parts that you can relate to can prove to be a key factor in helping you develop the skills necessary to understand and communicate with others.
Aside from exposing yourself to the humanities to gain better analytical and interpretive skills, by not pursuing a holistic and more well-rounded education, you’re also unintentionally missing out on a lot of good books. Books that educate you, challenge you, or inspire you.
Here are three of my top recommendations for students considering a career in healthcare:
This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - Adam Kay
“They must have something that cannot be memorized and graded: a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness.”
The story of a resident sharing his experiences in medicine, the hard truth to swallow of how it can impact your personal life, as well as how his journey came to an end. Because of how well-written this is, it holds the audience captive in what would seemingly have been impossible situations and unreal hilarity of his day-to-day. Written in journal format, every entry was originally for his own personal reflection simply because of how absurd his days could sometimes be - this ultimately is what makes it such a good read. It is unfiltered, raw, and the complete truth with no sugar coating of what his experiences were like, what went through his mind as he tackled each obstacle, and what his final thoughts were about his career. This book is a must-read for anybody considering a career in medicine; it shares the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, all the while shining the field in a light of awe and respect that one could only develop through years of experience. The ending is also incredibly insightful, as he explains what led him to making the difficult decision of giving up the career that he had spent the better majority of his schooling training for; I won’t give any spoilers, but I will say that to me, it was no phony excuse. He wasn’t just tired or feeling like it wasn’t worthwhile in the end; he was just a man who had his own unique obstacles and in the end he chose to do what was right for him, still cherishing the time he had and the person he grew into out of it all.
Ask Me About My Uterus - Abby Norman
“Since we all have varying degrees of tolerance for pain, and have equally varied experiences with different types of pain, it makes the scale feel kind of meaningless -- especially when you consider that the person trying to ascertain how much pain the patient is in has his or her own experiences with pain that are thrown into the mix, too.”
This is one of the more rare tales that are told explicitly from the patient’s point of view, adding a new perspective that all future health care professionals should centralize their training around. In addition to introducing a new point of view, and reminding the audience that the patient-physician relationship is designed to work best as a partnership (though this is often unfortunately overlooked or forgotten by some physicians), it brings into discussion the disparities in medicine found across genders. Since reading this book, all I can remember is the fact that women were not included as voluntary research participants until 1993 when the NIH Revitalization Act was passed (this act also, by the way, established minorities to be allowed to serve as voluntary research participants). No wonder there is such little research when it comes to women’s health! How unfairly so. It was not until after this act was passed, and women began to participate in research, that the medical community realized there are significant differences between men and women’s bodies and their reactions to various drugs -- even after accounting for their body weight. Even more absurd, was realizing that doctors less often prescribe women with painkillers such as oxycodone after surgery than they do men - women are perceived to need them less often. Sound familiar? (Hint: much like how historically whites have been given painkillers more consistently than blacks due to the fallacy that blacks have thicker skin). This book emphasizes from the patient’s perspective just how detrimental it can be when their feelings of pain are not taken seriously.
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance - Atul Gawande
“At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naïve.”
Gawande’s other books detailing his experiences as a surgeon and what he has learned throughout his training, Being Mortal and Complications being my favorite, are also very insightful and I encourage any reader who enjoyed Better to look into those as well. However, that being said, I feel that Better felt more relatable in its central message of remembering that we (the audience included) are all human at the end of the day. Humans make very human mistakes, and this is no reason to villainize them; rather, what really matters is that we are able to reflect and make sure we do better next time. It also is inspiring in its firm and unwavering belief that the effort to do better for people will make a difference. Even something seemingly so small as washing your hands and wearing a mask makes a difference, and every little bit counts!
Happy reading! If there are any bookworms out there that love giving suggestions - I love taking them! Send any genre of book my way and I will add it to my list! Until we meet again next post, GRMRers.