I will wind this week up by recommending another book that reads like a medical thriller but is all too true. Atul Gawnde’s “COMPLICATIONS, A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” is a collection of eye opening essays written for the New Yorker about patients and their doctors and how deadly mistakes happen. This book first came out in 2002 yet is as relevant as ever in light of today’s headlines warning us of nursing shortages, physician malpractice, and rampant hospital Staph and MRSA infection. As one reviewer writes

The idea that instinct and chance are as much a part of medicine as science and protocol is harrowingly illustrated in the final chapter where a patient admitted with harmless cellulitis is diagnosed with something truly horrifying.

Read up, get yourself an advocate if you are headed into surgery and above all stay healthy!

UPDATE:
The Way We Age by Atul Gawnde The New Yorker 4/07