Tag: Book Review

Off Our Chests: No Secrets Left Behind

May 27, 2021• 1

By CHADI NABHAN

She was a successful corporate lawyer turned professional volunteer and a housewife.

He was a charismatic, successful, and world-renowned researcher in gastrointestinal oncology. He was jealous of all breast cancer research funding and had declared that disease his nemesis.

They were married; life was becoming a routine, and borderline predictable. Both appeared to have lost some appreciation of each other and their sacrifices.

Then, she saw a lump, and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Not any breast cancer, but triple negative breast cancer. The kind that is aggressive and potentially lethal. The year was 2006, and their lives was about to change forever.

This is the story of Liza and John Marshall, who decided after 15 years of Liza’s diagnosis to disclose all, get all their secrets out in the open, and “off their chests”. They did so by writing a book that I read cover to cover and could not put down.

The authors decided to not only share their cancer journey as a patient and a caregiver, but also to share much of their personal and intimate details. They wanted us to know who they are as people, beyond patient and oncologist husband. We got to know how they met, when they met, and how they fell in love from the first sight. We got to know some corky personal details, and as a reader, I felt that I was part of their household. John shares how losing his mother at a young age to lymphoma affected him personally and professionally. We learn that they attend church every Sunday. Both are people of faith and they let us know how their faith helped them during these challenging times. Losing a dear friend to breast cancer took a toll and certainly made them less certain whether Liza’s fate would be any different.

They alternate writing chapters so that we get to know various events and stories from their sometimes-opposing points of view. We get to understand how a cancer diagnosis affects a caregiver, who happens to be a busy academic oncologist with little time to spare in between clinical practice and traveling for his work. At some point, John expresses resentment that all of the attention was being diverted towards his wife -the patient- and that he was left alone with few people caring how he felt and what struggles he was going through.

“When Blood Breaks Down”: It Can Break Your Heart

Jul 2, 2020

By CHADI NABHAN, MD, MBA, FACP

“The goal for me and for my clinical and research colleagues is to put ourselves out of a job as quickly as possible”. This is how Mikkael Sekeres ends his book “When Blood Breaks Down” based on true stories of patients with leukemia. I share Mikkael’s sentiments and have always stated that I’d be happy if I am out of a job caring for patients with cancer. To his and my disappointment, this wish is unlikely to ever come true, especially when dealing with leukemia.

With almost 15 years of experience, Sekeres possesses a wealth of knowledge and patient stories making him the ultimate storyteller taking us along an emotional journey that spanned hospital rooms, outpatient clinics, and even his car. We get to know Mikkael the person and the doctor and immediately recognize how difficult it is to separate these two from each other. With hundreds of patients he has cared for, Mikkael could choose which stories to share. He decides on 3 patients, each with a unique type of leukemia and a set of circumstances that makes their story distinct. While I don’t know for certain, his selection likely reflected his ultimate goal of writing this book. It was about sharing life lessons he had learned from his patients–lessons that we could similarly learn—but it was also about giving us a glimpse of history in medicine and the progress that has been made in treating leukemia.

We get to know the three main characters of the book very well. David is an older man with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), Joan is surgical nurse who suddenly finds herself diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), and Mrs Badway is a pregnant woman who was in her 2^nd trimester when she was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). While learning about their illnesses and family dynamics, Sekeres educates us about the various types of leukemia and enlightens his readers about so much history that I found fascinating. I did not know that the Jamshidi needle that I have used on so many patients to aspirate their bone marrows was invented by an Iranian scientist. Maybe I should have known, but I didn’t, that FISH was developed at Yale in 1980 and the first description of leukemia has been attributed to a French surgical anatomist, Dr. Alfred Velpeau in 1827. Somehow, I always thought that Janet Rowley discovered the Philadelphia chromosome, but Sekeres corrects me when he pictured Peter Nowell and David Hungerford who discovered that chromosome in 1961. As a reader, you might be more drawn to the actual patient stories, but the geek in me enjoyed the history lessons, especially the ones I was unaware of. Sekeres inserts these pearls effortlessly and with perfect timing. He does that so seamlessly and naturally that you learn without realizing you are being taught.

“Chasing My Cure”: A Book Review

Dec 16, 2019

By CHADI NABHAN, MD, MBA, FACP

Have you thought about your own mortality?

Who hasn’t, given the frequency of seeing death and grief depicted in the media or through real life encounters with friends, relatives, neighbors, or patients? These incidents trigger uncomfortable and sometimes uneasy thoughts of how we might personally deal with potential illness and disease. The same thoughts are soon displaced by the busyness of living.

Despite dealing with the death of his mother from a brain tumor, we learn David Fajgenbaum was healthy, living life to its fullest, and a future doctor in the making. He may have thought about his own mortality as he grieved the death of his mother, but likely never imagined anything dire would happen to him. Fajgenbaum was pushing forward on several fronts, including leading a non-for-profit organization for grieving college students, symbolically named “Actively Moving Forward” or “AMF” after his mother’s initials, all while first playing college football and then attending medical school. By all accounts, this was a vigorous young man, meticulous about his diet and physicality. When he became ill, it was a blunt reminder that life is unpredictable.

In his book “Chasing my Cure”, Dr. Fajgenbaum takes us back to the time when he first got ill. He vividly describes his physical symptoms and various scans which detected his enlarged nodes. Interestingly, we learn how long he was in denial of these symptoms, thereby delaying medical attention in favor of studying. This neglect of self-care highlights part of his personality, but also represents the pressure and expectations placed upon a majority of medical students.

Obsessive Measurement Disorder: Etiology of an Epidemic

Feb 13, 2019• 6

By KIP SULLIVAN JD

Review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller, Princeton University Press, 2018

In the introduction to The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Muller urges readers to type “metrics” into Google’s Ngram, a program that searches through books and other material published over the last five centuries. He tells us we will find that the use of “metrics” soared after approximately 1985. I followed his instructions and confirmed his conclusion (see graph below). We see the same pattern for two other buzzwords that activate Muller’s BS antennae – “benchmarks,” and “performance indicators.” [1]

Muller’s purpose in asking us to perform this little exercise is to set the stage for his sweeping review of the history of “metric fixation,” which he defines as an irresistible “aspiration to replace judgment based on personal experience with standardized measurement.” (p. 6) His book takes a long view – he takes us back to the turn of the last century – and a wide view – he examines the destructive impact of the measurement craze on the medical profession, schools and colleges, police departments, the armed forces, banks, businesses, charities, and foreign aid offices.

Foreign aid? Yes, even that profession. According to a long-time expert in that field, employees of government foreign aid agencies have “become infected with a very bad case of Obsessive Measurement Disorder, an intellectual dysfunction rooted in the notion that counting everything in government programs will produce better policy choices and improved management.” (p. 155)

Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, makes it clear at the outset that measurement itself is not the problem. Measurement is helpful in developing hypotheses for further investigation, and it is essential in improving anything that is complex or requires discipline. The object of Muller’s criticism is the rampant use of crude measures of efficiency (cost and quality) to dish out rewards and punishment – bonuses and financial penalties, promotion or demotion, or greater or less market share. Measurement can be crude because it fails to adjust scores for factors outside the subject’s control, and because it measures only actions that are relatively easy to measure and ignores valuable but less visible behaviors (such as creative thinking and mentoring). The use of inaccurate measurement is not just a waste of money; it invites undesirable behavior in both the measurers and the “measurees.” The measurers receive misleading information and therefore make less effective decisions (for example, “body count” totals tell them the war in Viet Nam is going well), and the subjects of measurement game the measurements (teachers “teach to the test” and surgeons refuse to perform surgery on sicker patients who would have benefited from surgery).

What puzzles Muller, and what motivated him to write this book, is why faith in the inappropriate use of measurement persists in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work and has toxic consequences to boot. This mulish persistence in promoting measurement that doesn’t work and often causes harm (including driving good teachers and doctors out of their professions) justifies Muller’s harsh characterization of measurement mavens with phrases like “obsession,” “fixation,” and “cult.” “[A]lthough there is a large body of scholarship in the fields of psychology and economics that call into question the premises and effectiveness of pay for measured performance, that literature seems to have done little to halt the spread of metric fixation,” he writes. “That is why I wrote this book.” (p. 13)

The Death of Cancer: Book Review and Reflections

Jan 1, 2019• 6

By CHADI NABHAN MD, MBA, FACP

Some books draw you in based on a catchy title, a provocative book jacket, or familiarity with the author. For me, recollections of medical school primers written by the renowned lymphoma pioneer Vincent DeVita Jr. and my own path as an oncologist immediately attracted me to “The Death of Cancer.” I felt a connection to this book before even reading it and prepped myself for an optimistic message about how the cancer field is moving forward. Did I get what I bargained for?

Co-authored with his daughter, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, DeVita brings us back decades ago to when he had just started at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the wings of Jay Freireich and Tom Frei. At the time, he was a clinical associate and a “chemotherapist”; the field was ultimately renamed and defined as medical oncology. (Note to self: I am ecstatic the field was renamed; I would prefer to be called a medical oncologist anytime than a chemotherapist, but that’s just me). He recounts how chemotherapy was frowned upon in favor of the two preferable ways to treat cancer at the time: surgery and radiotherapy. DeVita eloquently describes how his mentors were ridiculed when they announced their pursuit to cure childhood leukemia using combination chemotherapy; their approach and determination provided him with inspiration to push his research further. He goes on to describe in a fascinating manner the way he designed the MOPP regimen, which cured many patients with Hodgkin lymphoma. He recounts events when he presented his own MOPP data, and how he was verbally attacked by radiotherapists who claimed his data were insufficient and attempts to drive them “out of business”. Even in 2018, my radiation oncology colleagues protest when medical oncologists challenge the role of radiation therapy in Hodgkin lymphoma. I have actually grown tired of attending debates between any two prominent lymphoma figures discussing whether to use radiation or not in such setting; there are better topics to argue about, like who might win the Super Bowl.

Medicine in Denial

May 4, 2013• 55

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

“Any system of care that depends on the personal knowledge and analytic capabilities of physicians cannot be trusted.”

Finally, I’ve come across a really spot-on analysis of what ails healthcare, and some proposals that have serious potential to improve healthcare for people like my patients. Come to think of it, implementing these proposals would surely improve care for all patients.

The analysis, and the proposed fixes, are detailed by Dr. Lawrence Weed and his son Lincoln Weed, in their book “Medicine in Denial.” (The quote above is from this book.)

The book is a little long, but for those who are interested in leveraging technology to make healthcare more consistent and more patient-centered, I’d say it’s a must-read and must-discuss. (I’m a bit surprised that this book doesn’t seem to have many reviews, and that Dr. Weed’s ideas are not more often cited by those advocating for digital health and patient empowerment.) In particular, the Weeds’ book provides:

An excellent description and analysis of two huge fundamental problems in healthcare. One is the way we persist in relying on fallible physician minds to manage the process of evaluating, diagnosing, and managing medical problems. The other is our lack of standards for consistently documenting and organizing information related to our evaluation and management of patients. Both lead to idiosyncratic, disorganized healthcare that generally serves patients poorly, especially those who are medically complex or have multiple chronic conditions.
A proposed method of using computers and technology to consistently connect patient data to medical knowledge, leading to better diagnosis and medical management.