A Psychiatrist's Reflections on Healing in a Changing World
by M.D., Dora Calott Wang
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2010
368 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
In the past two decades, a seismic shift has occurred within the walls of our nation's hospitals and doctor's offices. The medical profession - once considered a sacred, cherished vocation - has devolved into a business motivated by a desire for profits. Even psychiatry, once the mainstay of the human interaction between doctor and patient, has fallen victim to rising costs and dictates by insurance sources.
How has medicine strayed so far from its roots? In The Kitchen Shrink, psychiatrist and lecturer Dora Calott Wang delves into what happened.
Through the prism of her own story, Wang elucidates key events in her professional life - the declining state of hospitals and clinics, the advent of managed care, and the rise of profits at the expense of patient care - that highlight the medical profession's decline. Along the way we meet some of her patients, whose plights reflect the profession's growing indifference to the human lives at risk. There's Selena, whose grief over her mother's death and lack of family support make it difficult for her to take the medicine that keeps her body from rejecting her new liver, and Leonard, a schizophrenic with no health insurance who develops peritonitis and falls into a coma for three months. Each new story brings additional compromises as the medical landscape shifts under Wang's feet. She struggles with depression and exhaustion, witnesses the loss of top doctors who leave in frustration, and attempts to find a balance between work and home as it becomes ever clearer that she cannot untangle the uncertain future of her patients from her own.
Part personal story and part rallying cry, The Kitchen Shrink is an unflinchingly honest, passionate, and humane inside look at the unsettling realities of free-market medicine in today's America.
"Starred Review. A thoroughly compelling message - without an ethical commitment to the value of every life, 'the very humanity of our society is at stake.'" - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Kitchen Shrink was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dora Calott Wang, M.D. is a psychiatrist who has degrees from the Yale School of Medicine and the University of California-Berkeley. She has been in private practice, has served on hospital staffs, and has been a medical school instructor. She also has a master's in English from Berkeley.
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