Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole
A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
"Tell the doctor where it hurts." It sounds simple enough, unless the problem affects the very organ that produces awareness and generates speech. What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Reaching Down the Rabiit Hole, Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:
• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb
• A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off
• A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play
• A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive
• A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth living
How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ropper, a professor at Harvard Medical School and founder of neurological intensive care, and Burrell (Postcards from the Brain Museum) present an intriguing, if meandering, account of neurology's real-world applicability. The authors repeatedly emphasize, that proper diagnoses of neurological issues require both intensive study and exquisite intuition because the brain is so mysterious. Among the many patients featured is a chronic-pain faker who tries to score drugs and gets caught red-handed as well as a psychotic whose confusion, unlike other patients with severe cognitive problems, has its "own internal logic," leading him to believe Ropper was two different people despite exhibiting full awareness of his surroundings. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Ropper's work is that every individual's mind, both in sickness and in health, is as unique as the proverbial snowflake. "Up on the ward," he says, "every grand theory of mind and every sweeping generalization about consciousness falls apart when exposed to the cold, hard truth of a single case." The book struggles to coalesce around a central claim or message of particular intrigue, though Ropper and Burrell still lead the reader a captivating stroll through the concepts and realities of neurological science.
