Routine Miracles: Personal Journeys of Patients and Doctors Discovering the Powers of Modern Medicine by Conrad Fischer

From Barnes & Noble

Have medical students today lost their zeal to find life-saving cures? That is the provocative question behind Dr. Conrad Fischer's Routine Miracles, a medical book with implications for readers far beyond the field. To find the answers, the award-winning medical educator surveyed more than 3,000 physicians and interviewed hundreds of patients. The widespread discontent that he discovered among doctors might surprise you, but the book never lapses into a grim jeremiad.

From the Publisher

“This book covers medical advances that would once have been called miracles but have now become routine. The patients’ stories within this book yield hope, optimism, and triumph.  This is the best time ever to come out of medical school and training.  This fact will inspire and uplift everyone in the medical profession as well as all of us who must, at some point, rely on the art of medicine to see us through.”

                                                                                                —Conrad Fischer, MD

What has ruined today’s medical students’ interest in devoting their lives to finding cures for the most rampant diseases riddling our population? How can young doctors not be energized and excited by modern breakthroughs? Why are they not inspired by the ability of current AIDS drugs to increase life expectancy by twenty-five years? 

In Routine Miracles, award-winning internist and medical educator Conrad Fischer investigates the disconnect between medical advances and the rise of physician dissatisfaction.  Fischer surveyed more than 3,000 physicians and interviewed hundreds of patients to uncover the seedsof doctors’ discontent.   Based upon his findings, he offers a deeply personal and compelling call to action for all of us, doctor and patient alike, to celebrate the present and the future of medicine.

Publishers Weekly

Fischer injects both passion and verve to this account of medical breakthroughs. "I am a physician writing a book on hope," says Fischer, who works at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center's Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn. He's also urging doctors to better communicate the impressive list of routine miracles the profession regularly performs: minimally invasive spinal surgery on pain-wracked patients that gets them on their feet immediately afterward; tiny catheters that reverse a stroke; drugs that lower the mortality rate of congestive heart failure; laser procedures that cure deafness; advances in pain management and targeted cancer therapies, to name just a few. Fischer also shows how a doctor's empathy-even when it has to be learned-is the real glue between physician and patient. "Most patients I approached about this project readily agreed to be interviewed, and many seemed hungry to be heard, to have the ear of a doctor who at least was deeply interested in the emotional aspect of their illness," he notes. That's a miracle that should always be routine.(Sept.)

Library Journal

Fischer (associate chief of medicine, SUNY Downstate Sch. of Medicine) is probably best known for the Fischer method of preparation for the internal medical board exams, which entails learning the medical decision-making process by discerning the best and most accurate tests to recommend for patients. Here, Fischer wants to help laypeople develop a partnership with their physician and to encourage medical students to engage in the profession. Each chapter describes via vignettes how the lives of patients who are living with or have had treatment for fairly common problems such as leukemia have been immeasurably improved by modern technology and modern doctoring. There are no major adverse effects reported by the patients or their physicians. Fischer is excellent at demystifying complex information and simplifying terminology, without making it simplistic. VERDICT Though frank about his early years, Fisher has not written a memoir; the reconstructed dialog with experts in their fields is often entertaining. A breezily written book with broad consumer health appeal. (Appendix and in-context references not seen.)—Martha E. Stone, Massachusetts General Hosp. Lib., Boston

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