Stories That Will Change the Way You Practice Medicine

Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form, but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. 

In Shock is a riveting first-hand account from a young critical care physician, who in the passage of a moment is transfigured into a dying patient. Shatteringly personal, and yet wholly universal, she offers a brave roadmap for anyone navigating illness. At the same time, she presents physicians with a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient. All told, she cogently outlines the redemptive possibilities of dismantling the barriers to connection in all relationships.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe while medical community marks a division between body and soul and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former.

“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth,” so goes the saying, “is a story.”

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These stories, told by Dr. Scott Abramson based on his 40 years of medical experience and from coaching colleagues in the mission of physician communication, embody some of these human truths: truths about listening, connection, faith, bereavement, death, teamwork, empathy, courage, grace, joy, leadership, parenting, burnout, the challenges of work-life balance, and the secret of happiness.

Surgeons and health care professionals are trained to fix the human body, but they are poorly prepared for the nonclinical realities that accompany their careers-complications, harsh criticism, difficult personalities, leadership failures, and the silent weight of moral injury. Cut Open offers a different path. Trauma and acute care surgeon Dr. Daniel Eiferman shows readers how to build resilience, leadership, psychological safety, and emotional stability through story-driven lessons forged in the high-stakes environment of the operating room. 

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Drawing from real surgical cases, personal hardship, and years of teaching physicians, Dr. Eiferman gives readers a practical, memorable, and honest tool kit for the parts of medicine no one teaches: conflict, feedback, bounce-back skills, internal narrative, perspective, and the difficult personalities no one trains you for.

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. 

Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.