11–18 of 18 posts
His book Do No Harm is fantastic. Highly recommend.
Do No Harm is a real rollercoaster. You can be confronted with death at one moment, then laughing the next as he angrily rails against the inanities of NHS IT policy. (I listened to it as an audiobook - the narrator was absolutely top notch and extremely entertaining.)
I found the author's honesty fascinating ("I had caused a major stroke"). I wonder if he was practicing in the US whether he could be as forthcoming, with lawyers hovering.
It never seemed to be lawsuits that soured them on the profession, though, but targets and bureaucracy. Even amongst doctors I know, most woes are pinned down to the NHS's modern addiction to statistics to judge everything.
I believe it was Henry himself who lamented that he was always happy to take on complex, last ditch "you might as well operate, they're dying anyway" cases and he frequently pulled off miracles. In a statistics driven system, though, it looks very bad and you can lose funding (or even your job) if a certain percentage of your patients die, so why perform such risky operations when you can let them die naturally? This is hugely demoralizing to the sort of people who become high end surgeons and early retirement is common.
This felt like I was reading Tolkien mixed with a bit of William Gibson. Fantastic.
Prime candidate for nano bots
His book Do No Harm is fantastic. Highly recommend.
Seconded. His followup book as well where he reflects a lot more at a philosophical level. Do No Harm is a real rollercoaster. You can be confronted with death at one moment, then laughing the next as he angrily rails against the inanities of NHS IT policy. (I listened to it as an audiobook - the narrator was absolutely top notch and extremely entertaining.)
I found the author's honesty fascinating ("I had caused a major stroke"). I wonder if he was practicing in the US whether he could be as forthcoming, with lawyers hovering.
I've read most of the recent autobiographies by top British doctors (including Henry's) and they all have sour stories to tell around facing panels of bureaucrats (full on courtroom sagas, no - they're not a common feature of British medical justice). It never seemed to be lawsuits that soured them on the profession, though, but targets and bureaucracy. Even amongst doctors I know, most woes are pinned down to the NH…
Yes, statistics are never a substitute for knowledge, no matter how much SVs insists that it is.
Prime candidate for nano bots
Prime candidate for nano bots
When I fully realized that we are basically made up of biological nanobots, I became a lot less optimistic about nanotechnology. I believe every aspiring nanotechnologist should be required to study microbiology to some extend to become aware what can go wrong with self-replicating and self-arranging systems.