NEW YORK: For the Indian American community with its penchant for having at least one doctor in the family, if not for being associated with one in the very least, Dr Sandeep Jauhar's new book 'Intern: A Doctor's Initiation' is a must read.
Dr Jauhar is among the many Indian American doctors who double up as high profile journalists in the mainstream American media and as authors, like CNN's Sanjay Gupta. The book chronicles the first year of Dr Jauhar's medical residency, the legendarily brutal apprenticeship that many doctors consider the most trying time of their professional lives.
Jauhar navigates the pitfalls of nights on call, calling codes, informed consent, treating depressions other than his own, and generally coping with patients so exhausted and scared that doctor and patient alike just want to go home.
It is Dr Jauhar's story of his days and nights in residency at a prominent teaching hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question every conventional assumption about doctors and medicine -- and that makes him an ideal figure to speak to one's own misgivings about doctors and medicine today. Residency -- and especially its first year, called "internship" -- is an apprenticeship legendary for its brutality.
Working eighty or more hours per week and staying up "on call" every fourth night, most new doctors spend their first year in a state of perpetual exhaustion, shunning family, friends, food, sex, and other pleasures -- and asking themselves why they ever wanted to be doctors in the first place.
Jauhar's internship was even more harrowing than most: The younger son in an intensely competitive family, he switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a more humane calling -- only to find that medicine is often a "cookbook" craft with little regard for the patient. He struggled to find a place among the hospital's squadrons of cocky Type-A residents and doctors.
A journalist on the side, he challenged the spirit-breaking practices of the internship in The New York Times, attracting the suspicions of the medical bureaucracy. Then, suddenly stricken, he became a patient himself -- an experience that gave him rare insight into the doctor-patient relationship, enabling him to see that today's high-tech, high-pressure medicine can be a humane science after all.
Now a cardiologist, Sandeep Jauhar has all the qualities you'd want in your own doctor: expertise, insight, a feel for the human factor, a sense of humor, and a keen awareness of the worries that we all have in common.
His beautifully written, deeply felt memoir explains how he and his fellow interns survived -- and explains the inner workings of modern medicine as no guidebook or magazine article can. Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend's incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people's lives directly.
Once situated at a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his induction into the profession. Jauhar's conception of doctoring and medicine changed during those first eighteen months as he asked all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are asking -- and reached satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine.
A thriving cardiologist, he is director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He writes regularly for The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine.
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