The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (TED Books)
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Language: English
Pages: 96
ISBN: 1476784841
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Essential, required reading for doctors and patients alike: A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the world’s premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little-known principles that govern medicine—and how understanding these principles can empower us all.
Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a “science”? Sciences must have laws—statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences?
Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question—a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline—culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine.
Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee’s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.
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medicine provokes no response, or the response is not durable. Occasionally, a trial shows a striking response, but it is unpredictable and fleetingly rare. Only 1 woman in a trial of 1,000 women might experience a near complete disappearance of all the metastatic lesions of breast cancer—while 999 women experience no response. One patient with widely spread melanoma might live for fifteen years, while the rest of the cohort has died by the seventh month of the trial. The trouble with such
into the woman’s abdomen and closed the vessels shut. The patient was safe, but the resident looked devastated. But then, it was as if a tiny bolt of knowledge had moved, like an electric arc, between Castle and his resident. The resident modified his approach. He walked over, past the surgical drapes above the woman’s head, to confer with the anesthesiologist. He confirmed that the anesthesia was adequate and the patient was safely sedated. Then he returned to the surgical field and blotted out
important, the capacity to examine thousands of genes in parallel, without making any presuppositions about the mutant genes, allowed researchers to find novel, previously unknown genetic associations with cancer. Some of the newly discovered mutations in cancer were truly unexpected: the genes did not control growth directly, but affected the metabolism of nutrients or chemical modifications of DNA. The transformation has been likened to the difference between measuring one point in space versus
corporeal indignities of a man in a blue cotton gown in a room or the doctor trying to heal him—and you have a discipline that is still learning to reconcile pure knowledge with real knowledge. The “youngest science” is also the most human science. It might well be the most beautiful and fragile thing that we do. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of
train station at Harvard Square. Lived is a euphemism. I was on call every third night at the hospital—awake the whole night, admitting patients to the medical wards, writing notes, performing procedures, or caring for the acutely ill in intensive care units. The next day—postcall—was usually spent in a dull haze on my futon, catching up on lost sleep. The third day we named flex, for “flexible.” Rounds were usually done by six in the evening—and the four or five hours of heady wakefulness that