Credentials should be as important as personality.

Groopman suggests that patients need to be careful of the first impressions they might form of a doctor. Medical residents were charged with filling in the gaps that the doctors left. He was reminded of his own work at Massachusetts General Hospita, where he saw patients devoted to their less than stellar doctors. He was asked how patients could determine if a doctor was incompetent, though the doctor might be nonetheless kind. To do so, they need answers to the questions that I asked myself, and for which I had no ready answers.” Groopman was inspired to write the book after delivering a presentation about compassion and communication. Patients and their loved ones can aid even the most seasoned physician avoid errors in thinking. Using this knowledge, patients can offer a doctor the most vital information about themselves, to help steer him toward the correct diagnosis and offer the therapy they need. Patients and their loved ones can be true partners with physicians when they know how doctors think, and why doctors sometimes fail to think. The epilogue offers words that patients, their families, and their friends can use to help a physician or surgeon think, and thereby better help themselves. He writes: “At the end of this journey through the minds of doctors, we return to language. He writes that patients can help doctors in finding the answers to their medical problems. In the introduction to his book, Groopman talks about how there was little research on how doctors think, but he often thought about the topic. He is also a writer for The New Yorker magazine.

How Doctors Think is a 2007 work of nonfiction by Jerome Groopman, chair of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

How doctors think book