How Doctors Think is a book released in March 2007 by Jerome Groopman, the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
The book opens with a discussion of a woman in her thirties who suffered daily stomach cramps and serious weight loss, and who visited some 30 doctors over a period of 15 years. Several misdiagnoses were made before she was finally found to have celiac disease. Groopman explains that no one can expect a physician to be infallible, as medicine is an uncertain science, and every doctor sometimes makes mistakes in diagnosis and treatment. But the frequency and seriousness of those mistakes can be reduced by "understanding how a doctor thinks and how he or she can think better".
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