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

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Dr. Allan H. Ropper is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is credited with founding the field of neurological intensive care and counts Michael J. Fox among his patients.

Allan Ropper's new memoir, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, has the hard-boiled style of a Raymond Chandler novel. Like a real-life Dr House, Ropper follows hunches and has sudden startling insights. * The Times *

PDF / EPUB File Name: Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.pdf, Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.epub Filled with patient histories and puzzling symptoms waiting to be understood, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is a detective novel, and despite his flapping white coat and squeaking Crocs, Ropper is Humphrey Bogart, cerebral yet tough and blessed with a terse wit. -- Christian Donlan * New Statesman * Dr Allan H. Ropper is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Raymond D. Adams Master Clinician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is credited with founding the field of neurological intensive care and counts Michael J. Fox among his patients. A moderately interesting story of the life of a neurologist, marred by the gigantic ego of the author. I'm sure you need a gigantic ego to do the job and there are plenty of stories where he gets stuff wrong (at first, before getting it right obv) but the overall impression is of being sat next to someone at a dinner party who starts off seeming an absolutely fascinating and enthralling raconteur and by the third course you're wondering who you ought to stab in the eye with a dessert fork: yourself or him. He had a bad headache from the beginning," she told me, "and a fever." The residents had neglected to mention this, but it was important.

What they hope, what they expect, what they deserve, is that we take the time to listen, because the act of listening is therapeutic in itself. When we do it right, we learn details that make us better doctors for the next patient. The residents may not get this yet. They are focused on diagnosis and treatment, on technology, on scales, titers, doses, ratios, elevations, and deficiencies. All well and good, I tell them, but don’t forget to listen.” An in-the-trenches exploration of the challenging world of the clinical neurologist. From the quotidian to the exotic, from the heart-breaking to the humorous, the authors present an honest and compelling look at one of medicine's most fascinating specialties. * Dr Michael Collins, author of Hot Lights, Cold Steel *What are you watching?" Hannah asked Vincent, in an inflection she would later inform me was Kansan rather than Missourian.

I just ran into your Mr. Talma in the elevator lobby." Elliott, a colleague who seems to keep closer tabs on my patients than I do, had buttonholed me in the corridor outside of the ward. "When I gave him a shout-out," he said, "you'd think I'd asked him to put up bail for the Unabomber. The guy comes in here a pussycat, and when you finish with him he's Mr. What's-It-To-You-Pal. No more smiles, no more jokes. What did you do to him?" The brain, that eternally mysterious blancmange of grey matter, has become very fashionable these days. That may seem a curious observation, given that our brains have always been at the centre of everything we think and do. But there does seem to be a growing popular interest in all things neurological. Gilbert, the medical student who had made the initial exam, recorded this as "orientation times one."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. Yet this unreliability is itself a window into another reality, the distorted Alice in Wonderland world to which the title refers and in which neurological patients are wont to find themselves tormentingly trapped. may not get this yet. They are focused on diagnosis and treatment, on technology, on scales, titers, doses, ratios, elevations, and deficiencies. All well and good, I tell them, but don’t forget to listen.” The difference in American healthcare (as opposed to the British) was very obvious here. It still astounds me that healthcare is considered a privilege in the states. The discussion about medical ethics and neuropsychiatry are two of my favourite aspects of the book. As with all books of this genre, there are some tongue in cheek moments and some which some readers may raise an eyebrow at. By the time Vincent Talma and Cindy Song had settled in at the Brigham, Arwen Cleary had been there for four days. She came by ambulance on the morning of July 1, and was admitted to neurological intensive care from the Emergency Department later that evening. Of the three cases, hers was the least clear-cut, the most troubling, and one that had the potential to become an absolute shambles. According to her medical records, her problems had begun two years earlier, when she showed up at a central Massachusetts hospital with disabling nausea, difficulty walking, and vomiting.

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. I was out on the ward at about 9:30 that morning when the call about Cindy Song arrived from the other hospital. I've rounded up the book from a very precise 2.75 to a 3 because it wasn't a bad read, just not a very good one. 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 is a really fascinating book. It's a little fictionalised, so we get dialogues and little portraits of character, enough that we can care about the cases discussed. Dr Ropper is pretty much everything an ideal doctor should be: knowledgeable, capable of acting fast, capable of explaining complex processes clearly, intuitive, willing to listen, willing to admit he's wrong... At every stage, he emphasises to the reader and to the residents he's teaching that each case is individual, that the right answer for one person isn't the right one for the next, and so on. This book never engaged me entirely. It was supposed to be anecdotal--stories about neurology. I found the stories too brief, but that was largely because the author never had a chance to follow up on long-term outcomes. Once he had solved the problem, the patient either died or went home. 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. Hannah was in charge. Her service, the culmination of three years as a neurological resident, had started a week before I came on board. A "service" involves running the neurology inpatient ward, admitting and discharging the patients, and directing a team consisting of three junior residents, two medical students, and a physician's assistant—a cohort that could barely squeeze into Vincent's curtained-off half of the room.