Click Here To Purchase Doctor Confidential: Secrets Behind the Veil

Author: Richard Sheff

Publisher: Listen to Your Heart Press
ISBN: 978-0-9830819-0-6
 
The warmth of Dr. Richard Sheff’s writing shines through this account of his training as a family physician all the way through medical school and residency more than a quarter of a century ago. The largest part of this book takes us through his years at medical school, from gross anatomy, via the fields of psychiatry, gynecology, obstetrics, surgery, internal medicine, and pediatrics, to the point where he has to choose a specialty, and undergo electives and subinternship. The second part of this personal memoir covers his internship and junior and senior residency.
 
Each chapter of this work highlights a different component of Dr. Sheff’s character, with, for instance, his compassion for others coming across most markedly in his description of his days spent becoming increasingly emotionally involved with the patients in a psychiatric institution. In his endeavors to help the patients, he clearly goes above and beyond the bounds of duty. In fact, his empathy for those afflicted with various mental illnesses is so heartrending that many lay readers will likely be brought to the edge of tears when he records how both the patients and he were upset by his leaving the Institute when he finished his time there. Dr. Sheff is also only too willing to recognize his own limitations. The poignant statement with which he closes the above chapter shows only too clearly his personal regrets: “In spite of my intentions otherwise, I never returned to the Institute.”
 
Dr. Sheff clearly takes into account that not all his readers are in the medical field, as he clarifies and contextualizes all terms that he uses that might be foreign to the average lay reader. His explanations are never condescending, though—he approaches readers with a spirit of bonhomie, very much conveying the impression that you are on his level.
 
Fascinating as his tales of medical practice may be, it is in Dr. Sheff’s deeply personal and insightful approach to the more human and humane aspects of such practice that he excels. Small wonder, then, that he can round off the memoir by sharing how, when branching out on his own as a family physician, his patients “uniformly exclaimed they thought physicians like that were a thing of the past,” resulting in him being able to fill his practice within the space of a year.
 
Doctor Confidential: Secrets Behind the Veil should make ideal reading for any with an interest in medical training, as well as for the friends and family of physicians. A copy should be kept in the office of all career counselors as well, and made available on loan to any would-be medical student. Dr. Sheff’s sense of humor and relaxed, yet highly competent, style of writing should appeal to readers of all ages. No matter what medical advances have been made since Dr. Sheff’s days as a medical student, the ethics and principles of such practice remain the same. Not for nothing does Dr. Sheff preface his memoir with Hippocrates’ centuries old dictum, that is as valid today as it was in the days of Greek antiquity: “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.”
 
           
Click Here To Purchase Doctor Confidential: Secrets Behind the Veil