Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER

Stories from the ER: a doctor shows how empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers, and these stories often end without closure or solutions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 07 May 2024
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd

Stories from the ER: A Doctor Shows How Empathy, Creativity, and Imagination Are the Cornerstones of Clinical Care
Emergency room doctors are professional listeners to stories, and finding the heart of each patient's story is critical. More technology, tests, and data won't work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, imagination, and thinking like a writer become the cornerstones of clinical care in Tornado of Life, an ER physician's series of short, powerful, and affecting essays. Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of "and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then," tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of life." Baruch describes the emergency of loneliness, his own experience as a patient, the patient who demanded a hug, and emergency medicine during COVID-19. These stories often end without closure or solutions, but if the doctor has listened to their stories as well as treated them, the patients are discharged into the world.

Dimension: 203 x 133 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780262548427