Telltale Hearts
A Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A doctor's powerful meditation on what his patients taught him, and what they can teach us about listening, healing, and public health.
For over three decades, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger has served in one of the country’s busiest and most important public hospitals. A public health leader and primary care physician for underserved patients, Schillinger learned that high-tech tests and novel medications are often not enough to save lives. Rather, accurate diagnosis, treatment and true healing come from listening deeply to patients and their stories.
In Telltale Hearts, Schillinger reveals what is lost when patients’ stories are ignored or overlooked, and how much is gained when these stories are actively elicited. The stories themselves, at times shocking and always revelatory, disclose secrets, prompt awe, forge unexpected connections, and even catalyze public health action.
Telltale Hearts serves as a call to action, urging us to reshape public policy to improve the nation's health.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
San Francisco General Hospital physician Schillinger argues for the importance of listening closely to medical patients while highlighting the inequalities that plague the American healthcare system in this impassioned memoir. "The combination of science and stories holds the key to recovery," Schillinger begins, decrying medicine's tendency to "devalue stories" in favor of formulaic treatment. For much of the account, Schillinger reconstructs patient testimonies that have informed crucial treatment decisions across his three-decade career, including that of a construction worker who switched to liquid blood pressure medicine after admitting to Schillinger he couldn't swallow pills. Other chapters delve into Schillinger's experiences treating AIDS patients in "the trenches" of the early epidemic, and his efforts to fight obesity as the California Department of Public Health's chief of diabetes control. Throughout, Schillinger keeps a sharp eye on the contrast between the options available to patients at San Francisco General, a public hospital, with other, private Bay Area institutions, most memorably through a heartbreaking anecdote about failing to get a patient with signs of cancer bumped up on a treatment list. Schillinger's palpable empathy and narrative skill underscores his conviction that "stories can break down barriers and open up windows into other people's lives." The results are moving.
