Also Human The Inner Lives of Doctors Caroline Elton 2018

Dr Caroline Elton is a psychologist, who for over 20 years has listened to doctors talk about the impact their work has had on their lives. She uses her knowledge to examine the experience of working as a doctor in 21st-century medicine.

The Daily Mail reviewed Elton’s book and said, ‘Doctors are people, too. They possess the same virtues, faults, fears and desires as the rest of us but it’s easy for patients to forget this obvious truth, Caroline Elton’s revelatory book is a welcome reminder of this.

Adventures in Human Being Gavin Francis 2015 Published by Profile Books

Francis’s book is set out in chapters relating to each part of the body. He combines historical facts, literary references, medical knowledge and personal anecdote to bring to life the disease processes and illnesses that affect the health of patients. In his introduction, Francis writes, ‘the practice of medicine is not just a journey through the parts of the body and the stories of others, but an exploration of life possibilities an adventure in human being.’

The book enables the reader to take a step back and view each part of the body as a component of the larger whole. The book has several historically interesting black-and-white pictures.

Paradox of Progress James Willis 1995

Although this was written in the 1990s when GPs still wrote in Lloyd George paper records and did their own on-call this book still has a lot to offer any doctor. It describes the importance of the role of both the specialist and the generalist. The paradox Willis describes is that technological change and progress are not always associated with improved health care. Download this book for free on the author’s website.

Bad Pharma  Ben Goldacre 2012

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, science writer and  a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, part of the University of Oxford

His work unpicks the evidence behind claims from journalists, drug companies, politicians and quacks and was published by the Guardian under his hugely successful column  ‘Bad Science’. This work led to the publication of his first book ‘Bad Science’. The evidence and debate in his second book, Bad Pharma provided the impetus for Parliament to review the role of drug companies in research.

The text on the back of Goldacre’s book says, ‘Warning; the pharmaceutical industry has serious side-effects. Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But companies bury unflattering data, while regulators stand by, and doctors are misled by needlessly flawed research. Patients are harmed as a result.’ Goldacre’s book shows that the problems he has identified can be fixed.

You can read more about his work on his website badscience.net

Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman 2011

Kahneman is an Israeli American psychologist who is renowned for his work on the psychology of decision-making and judgement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in behavioural economics in 2002. His work challenges the assumption that humans are generally rational and their thinking logical.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is to be commended for both its broad-reaching scope and the simplicity of language used to describe complex psychological models. The book discusses the way in which humans make decisions and how the decision-making process is prone to influence by internal and external factors such as anchoring, priming, hindsight bias and loss aversion. Kahneman’s description of type one and type two is a concept that every doctor should be aware of. The book also contains many useful thought experiments which help the reader understand how behavioural economics can be applied to our everyday lives.

Expert by Roger Kneebone 2020

A very good review in the Guardian