Also human The inner lives of doctors

Both society and pop-culture depictions cast doctors as individuals endowed with special powers, immune to the revulsion others feel at the sight of blood, and devoted to an extraordinary calling. Elton, a vocational psychologist, spent the last 20 years observing, counseling, and helping very real, vulnerable, and wholly human people in the medical field. Following a rash of articles about tragic suicides that have occurred due to the stress and working conditions most medical doctors find themselves facing, Elton seeks to find the root causes of anxiety, second-guessing, and, ultimately, the abandonment of medicine found among doctors. Changing the names, but sharing specific client stories, she reveals professionals suffering all the normal ills of everyday life intensified by the demand to heal and do no harm. Though Elton's work centers on doctors in the UK, she also sights U.S. studies and universal challenges. Written in a welcoming style, this practical and helpful look at best medical practices will benefit patients, practitioners, and everyone else involved in health care.--Ruzicka, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist

Of course, doctors are humanand that, it follows from this book, explains why they're so flawed, emotionally chewed-up, and laden with bias and prejudice.Don't get sick in summer. That's one takeaway from this inquiry by British psychologist Elton, who looks at doctors on both sides of the Atlantic. In July in America and August in Britain, newly minted doctors take up their first jobsand the mortality rate soars as they make rookie errors. "August is the cruelest month, it seems," she writes, echoing T.S. Eliot. "At least for patients in teaching hospitals in the UK." Doctors are people, to be sure, as fallible as the rest. As the author observes, "the sexism or racism found in other professional spheres hasn't been surgically excised from medical work," and the emotional costs of dealing with the ill and the dying can be challenging. And what of the slow-witted, the doctors that barely got out of medical school and barely passed their boards? Usually, they struggle to keep up throughout their careers, but until some Yelp-like service is thoroughly integrated into medical ratings, you may never know that you're getting one of them instead of one who passed with flying colors. Elton is particularly good on the subtle matters of gender and ethnic discrimination that punish doctors who are different from the white, male mainstream; women doctors, she writes, "are paid less than their male counterparts" and diminished in meaningful ways for choosing to take time off or work part-time in order to raise children. Overall, Elton suggests that medical institutions must take the humanness of their doctors into better account, with an eye to determining who might "turn out not to be suited to the profession of medicine," a matter less dependent on ethnicity, gender, or the like than on emotional resilience.A useful adjunct to books from within medicine by the likes of Richard Selzer, Atul Gawande, and other metapractitioners. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.