Dora Calott Wang M.D. - The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World
Here you can read online Dora Calott Wang M.D. - The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World
- Author:
- Publisher:Penguin Publishing Group
- Genre:
- Year:2010
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
The personal story of how a psychiatrist confronts the profound changes sweeping the medical establishment as they reshape her life and career.
In the past two decades, a seismic shift has occurred within the walls of our nations hospitals and doctors 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 professions decline. Along the way we meet some of her patients, whose plights reflect the professions growing indifference to the human lives at risk. Theres Selena, whose grief over her mothers 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 Wangs 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 todays America.
In the past two decades, a seismic shift has occurred within the walls of our nations hospitals and doctors 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 professions decline. Along the way we meet some of her patients, whose plights reflect the professions growing indifference to the human lives at risk. Theres Selena, whose grief over her mothers 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 Wangs 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 todays America.
Dora Calott Wang M.D.: author's other books
Who wrote The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Dora Calott Wang M.D.
Lidia Yuknavitch
David Goldbloom
Dinah Miller
The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
For Physicians
o o o
Those having torches will pass them on to others.
o o o
Those having torches will pass them on to others.
Prologue
SPRING 2003
Everything now seems to be about Zoe, even the kitchen sink, which I fill with warm water for her bath this spring afternoon. I lean my face into gentle steam and linger my fingers on the soft hills of her baby feet. In her face as small as the palm of my hand, I see my past and all my future.
Sleepy days and interrupted nights blur into a hazy new life, but I still make it once in a while to the university where Im the psychiatrist for the medical hospital. After a grand rounds lecture last week, lights flickered on after an hour of slides. Fellow physicians smiled and hugged me. Dora, hows your baby? Dora, when are you coming back to work? What was I to saythat on my bookshelves at home Ive cleared away textbooks with chapters Ive written, psychiatry lectures Ive given, my stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff, to make room for baby bottles and hooded towels?
But its not just that my life has changed. Medicine and psychiatry have changed.
When I chose medicine for my career, it felt such a noble profession devoted to healing the sick and guarding the sanctity of human life. But now health care seems just another business.
Behind me on my kitchen table, next to unread medical journals and a red rattle, is a tall pile of worn pagesthe book Ive been trying to write since I began my career in the early 1990s. It started as a self-help book about new medications, new therapies, and patients who got better. But after long days at work, Id come home, switch on my desk lamp, and in its soft quieting light, Id write about patients who didnt get better. These were not self-help stories, but stories I couldnt keep from writing.
Years passed. I went from job to job where my task was to prescribe medications only, not what I expected Id be doing as a psychiatrist. Health care issues increasingly made national headlines. Dusty piles of pages accumulated on my desk, yet I wasnt writing self-help stories.
After Zoe was born on a snowy November morning, everything looked new in babys light. In those wintry first days of my new life, of feedings, sleep and tired moments in between, I took a good look at the book Id been trying to write. Surrounded by pages on the floor as my baby slept, I finally saw what I had written through the years.
I saw my story, a doctor working in the medical profession as it became the health care industry.
When I was a child, my doctor lived in my neighborhood and made house calls. We had devoted, lifelong relationships with our personal physicians. But the insurance company has long replaced the doctor as a patients primary medical relationship. Even my profession of psychiatry, the medical specialty that once healed through the doctor-patient relationship only, now seems an impersonal assembly line.
Id nearly discarded the story of my patient Selena. But now I understand why I couldnt stop writing about her. By writing her story I realized that I fought not just for her life, but for my own life, a way of practicing medicine centered on science, the doctor-patient relationship, and on the everyday practice of our highest human values.
I now see what Ive been writing these years, beneath the quiet light of my desk lamp.
My book turns out to be the story of my career as a physician and psychiatristwhich also is the story of the remarkable changes that have occured in American medicine.
Curtains lift in a springtime breeze. Out the kitchen window, I see Gabriel, a stout, red-bearded young doctor with a steady strength in his step. He stands on my back porch, a notebook in his hand. On his belt hang a hospital beeper, a cell phone, and a PalmPilot.
I scoop Zoe from the sink. I pull open my back door, Zoe in my arms, bundled in a towel the color of blooming lavender fields.
Dr. Wang, Im sorry. Ill come back later, Gabriel says.
I look into his eyes that are looking at my baby. I feel his air of authority. Dr. Gabriel Schwartz, a resident in training, looks like a psychiatrist. And me? Im now a housewife in a ponytail and black velour sweats.
Come in, Gabriel. Let me get you a drink.
In my kitchen, Gabriel contemplates the photos on my fridgenewborn Zoe swaddled in hospital blankets, my parents resting on lawn chairs surrounded by peach blossoms, in-laws and friends, all fastened by magnets from pharmaceutical corporations. A Paxil note-pad reminds me to pick up laundry detergent, baby shampoo, fusilli, basil. A lime-green Effexor clip holds emergency phone numbers. Beneath a sky-blue Zoloft magnet, Chris and I honeymoon in Aloha shirts. His Mediterranean curls are wild in tropical humidity.
I started Paolo on Celexa. Gabriel sips a raspberry spritzer. Hes depressed and wants to stop his transplant medicines. His new kidney would fail and it would be passive suicide.
Why Celexa? I ask. Do we know how it affects renal transplant patients? We walk to the library, now more a nursery, a room stocked with medical books, novels, Chriss books on architecture and urbanism, and lately, diapers and chew toys.
I cant help thinking: Gabriels patient needs my old-fashioned talk-therapy skills. But tomorrow will be another patient Ill want to help, then another. In my years as chief of the Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison Service at the University of New Mexico Hospital, I saw more than a thousand new patients each year. Weekly psychotherapy was a mathematical impossibility.
So I have gotten good at letting go.
The patients health insurance wont cover psychiatry visits to prevent organ rejection, even though they paid for a new organ, even if theyll pay for intensive medical care when Paolo goes into kidney failure again and again. So Gabriel assumed Paolos case as part of his training, free of charge.
Gabriel sips his drink. He strokes his auburn hair and beard. Celexa. Its only been on the market a few months. Ill do a literature search.
Medicines are tested only by their pharmaceutical makers before FDA approval, I remind Gabriel. Celexa is so new it cant have been tested yet in transplant patients. Id switch the patient to Zoloft. I feel like John Houseman in The Paper Chase. I am also reaching for a diaper.
Zoe smiles. I breathe in her scent, of powder-fresh baby soap and the sugar musk of milk.
When I was a resident in training, I visited my professor Dr. Martha Kirkpatrick weekly at her home. After funny dinners, as she called them, sometimes of chicken quickly microwaved and yellow bulb tomatoes from her garden, wed walk down a path to her home office, a white stand-alone cube with an orange door surrounded by flowers and vines. Here the deep healing of a patients mind and body occurred without machines or medicines, but through the doctor-patient relationship, with the doctor as the instrument of change. In Marthas office overlooking the tranquil, blue Pacific, I once told her, I started my patient Eric on Prozac.
Dora, why did you medicate him? Her eyes looked puzzled. Sunset glinted from her gray hair.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrists still mostly asked Why medication? not Which medication? But the 1990s was the Decade of the Brain, when science and technology became conventionally applied toward understanding human minds, once considered too nebulous, or too sacred, to probe in this way. Insurance companies also started calling the shots, preferring to pay psychiatrists to prescribe medications, leaving psychotherapy for counselors, if at all. It was a perfect storm. Martha griped about the end of medicine and the end of psychiatry. I wrote her off as eccentric. But all of my jobs since finishing my training in 1994 have been to prescribe medications, only.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World»
Look at similar books to The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Lidia Yuknavitch
David Goldbloom
Dinah Miller
Reviews about «The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrists Reflections on Healing in a Changing World and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.