What Patients Taught Me: A Medical Student's Journey

by Audrey Young

Overview

A young doctor writes frankly of her medical training in small rural communities around the world, reflecting on the important lessons she learned along the way
 
Do sleek high-tech hospitals teach more about medicine and less about humanity? Do doctors ever lose their tolerance for suffering? With sensitive observation and graceful prose, this stunning book explores some of these difficult and deeply personal questions, revealing the highs and lows of being a physician in training.
 
Author Audrey Young was just 23-years-old when she took care of her first dying patient. In What Patients Taught Me, she writes of this life-altering experience and of the other struggles she faced in her journey to become a good doctor—from exhausting 36-hour shifts to a perilous rescue mission in an Eskimo village. As she travels to small rural communities throughout the world, she attends to terminal illness, AIDS, tuberculosis, and premature birth, coming face-to-face with mortality and the medical, personal, and socioeconomic dilemmas of her patients.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570616587
Publisher:	Sasquatch Books
Publication date:	09/29/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. Audrey Young is an acting instructor in the department of medicine at the University of Washington and a staff physician. She lives in Seattle.

Editorial Reviews

Straightforward account of Young's time in a program that apprentices students to rural physicians. The author, now a staff physician at the University of Washington, was a medical student there when she learned of WWAMI, a program that exposes medical students to rural medicine in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Her first placement was a month-long tour of duty in a remote Eskimo outpost where the standard garb for doctors consisted of jeans, hiking boots, and a stethoscope; her first lessons came mainly from watching and listening. Subsequently, she did hospital rotations in Pocatello, Idaho (pediatrics), and Missoula, Montana (internal medicine). With each assignment, Young's responsibilities increased and she became more of a participant in patient care. She learned the art of connecting with patients and the importance of listening to their stories. By the end of her third year, in love with medicine as she had seen it practiced and yearning to move beyond the rural Pacific Northwest, she took a residency position in South Africa. The lessons there were harsher. With resources extremely limited, HIV skyrocketing, and tuberculosis and diabetes widespread, Young found that doctors had to choose whom to help; the choice was often simply to help those who had a chance to survive. Overwhelmed by disease and death, she nevertheless completed her residency and returned as a full-fledged general internist to Seattle, where she took on the care of patients in a community of refugees and the homeless. WWAMI, Young avers, gave her "intense glimpses into the human experience" and taught her that the patient's story, the most human element in medical practice, is often thehighest reward of doctoring. As she puts it, "Sometimes I enter a story and find I can bring a little light and relief to human suffering."Welcome evidence that the art of medicine is still being taught and practiced in a world where technology has all the glamour. Agent: Max Gartenberg

Kirkus Reviews

"Young is a gifted writer, and her prose is mesmerizing. She perfectly balances the details of breathtaking countryside with harsh medical realities to weave stories that capture one’s imagination and draw us fully in." —Journal of the American Medical

From the Publisher