"These essays illustrate how easily pride, misunderstanding, 
laziness, denial, poor data-gathering, avarice, expediency, 
selfishness and, above all, poor communication, can undo the best 
of technology, the best that medicine has to offer."—Abraham 
Verghese

The dozen personal essays in this collection, from patients and 
their caregivers, nurses, social workers, and physicians, address 
the devastating human results that can occur from a lack of 
communication and understanding among those in the health care 
profession. Medical error—much of it traceable to simple lack of 
communication—costs billions of dollars each year, in addition to 
the less quantifiable costs of the loss of trust in doctor-patient 
relationships and the decline in morale among health care 
professionals.

These powerful stories illustrate the need to find ways to break 
these potentially lethal silences. In "Mrs. Kelly," a doctor is 
pressured into sending a man home from the emergency room 
against his better judgment, agonizes over his decision, and later 
calls the man's widow to apologize. In "In Praise of Osmosis," a 
critical-care nurse pressures a hospital's hierarchy to authorize the 
continuous renal replacement therapy her patient needs to prevent 
imminent and irreversible damage to his kidneys. In "You Have 
the Right to Remain Silent," an inmate's sister must fight her way 
through miles of red tape to get treatment for the Hepatitis-C her 
brother contracted in prison. 

Inspired by groundbreaking research by VitalSmarts, a global leader 
in organizational performance and leadership, and the American 
Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), and supported by the 
Jewish Healthcare Foundation, Lee Gutkind, editor of the journal 
Creative Nonfiction, has collected the essays in this volume—with 
the hope that these voices, speaking out, taking action and risks, 
will inspire others to make changes that will improve communication 
within our troubled health care system.

_________________________________________________________

LEE GUTKIND's most recent book, Almost Human: Making 
Robots Think, details his experiences at the Robotics Institute at 
Carnegie-Mellon University. His immersion into the motorcycle 
subculture (Bike Fever), the organ transplant milieu (Many Sleepless 
Nights), and other previously un-mined worlds has led to nine books 
and many awards for his literary achievements. He is a professor of 
English at the University of Pittsburgh and founder and editor of the 
literary journal Creative Nonfiction. KAREN WOLK FEINSTEIN is 
president of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and chair of the 
Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative. ABRAHAM VERGHESE, 
a physician and writer, directs the Center for Medical Humanities 
and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San 
Antonio.


Medical Humanities Series, Thomas Mayo, series editor


Also edited by Lee Gutkind



RAGE AND RECONCILIATION

978-0-87074-503-4 PAPER

$19.95