Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

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Apropos of nothing really, but this reminds me of British game shows. It is very alien to the British to applaud oneself or one's accomplishments, whereas Americans jump up and down and shout out how proud they are of themselves, this makes British people cringe. However, it makes much more exciting television, so the producers now have got the British to run around arms in the air shouting out and generally looking awkard and embarrassed. Everyone feels the same inside, it's just a difference in expression and probably the one people prefer is the one of the culture they were brought up in. This book is about neurology, but the lessons apply to all medical specialties. It teaches all physicians to recognise the importance of the basics of clinical assessment, and to recognise the limitations of technology in making diagnoses. It is very enlightening and I recommend it to all doctors. Book Details There are any number of ways the brain can go wrong and Ropper seems to have encountered them all: meningitis, subarachnoid haemorrhage, embolism, tumours, gliomas, seizures and hemiplegias.

Full Book Name: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease I’m not sure that those statistics are entirely up to date, but in any case this is not a book for hypochondriacs or anyone who worries that their difficulty in remembering film stars’ names might stem from something more troubling than unmemorable film stars. Because the fear it plays on, consciously or not, is the sudden and cruel inversion of normality. It’s one of countless intriguing medical titbits that Ropper and Burrell stitch together in a series of what the subtitle accurately calls “extraordinary journeys into the human brain”. Something I learned from the book. That what a patient reports are symptoms and they are all subjective, things we feel, and have to be taken at face value. But what a doctor sees are signs, and they are objective. I'd never thought of it that way. Put the two together and you are on your way to a diagnosis. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

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In a sense, the book is long argument for the primacy of old-fashioned observation over newfangled technology. The central paradox with which it grapples is that in neurology the very means a patient uses to explain himself – ie his brain – is often impaired, and so unreliable. When all his colleagues think a patient is suffering from a brain tumour or a stroke, Ropper knows that it’s herpes encephalitis. He doesn’t need to look at scans. He can tell from a bedside exam. Submissions must be < 200 words with < 5 references. Reference 1 must be the article on which you are commenting.

Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18237 Openlibrary_edition All up, if you’re interested in the brain in all its mysterious glory you should probably keep this book on your radar. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, by Dr Allan Ropper and BD Burrell, is very much in the latter tradition. Ropper is a distinguished neurologist at Harvard Medical School. He has many fascinating tales to tell, but he doesn’t. Burrell does. Or at least Burrell is the prose man, turning Ropper’s professional stories into tight little homilies of neurological and existential meaning.

My takeaways from the book. 1) Neurological illness is highly specific to the person who has it, and requires long inquiry into the patient's self-reported symptoms. It is easy to miss the correct diagnosis, because presenting symptoms vary from purely physical to psychiatric. It takes years of careful listening to effectively diagnose each case. Reading this is like being a fly on the wall in a neurology ward. There are some real characters, and some real highs and lows. It’s in part an eye opening education and part like watching a car crash. Submissions should not have more than 5 authors. (Exception: original author replies can include all original authors of the article)