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

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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. This book is about neurology, but the lessons apply to all medical specialties. It teaches all physicians to recognise the importance of the basics of clinical assessment, and to recognise the limitations of technology in making diagnoses. It is very enlightening and I recommend it to all doctors. Book Details Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-08-23 09:04:25 Associated-names Burrell, Brian, 1955- author Boxid IA1911413 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Told in a breezy style through a series of real-life case studies, Ropper's book offers a fascinating glimpse of the ways in which our brain can go wrong. * Financial Times * Stories about a neurologist in an acute hospital. Tales of people with complex and often mind-boggling presentations, like the man who drove for half a day in circles in his car.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 *

My takeaways from the book. 1) Neurological illness is highly specific to the person who has it, and requires long inquiry into the patient's self-reported symptoms. It is easy to miss the correct diagnosis, because presenting symptoms vary from purely physical to psychiatric. It takes years of careful listening to effectively diagnose each case. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole does not particularly try to be funny, yet its commentary on how events happen to arrange themselves has a comic sensibility. Ropper's mirthless exchange of one-liner jokes with a hospital visitor who turns out to be a former comedy writer establishes a fellowship between the men and helps us understand the origins of this show business take on clinical neurology. 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.It’s one of countless intriguing medical titbits that Ropper and Burrell stitch together in a series of what the subtitle accurately calls “extraordinary journeys into the human brain”. Apropos of nothing really, but this reminds me of British game shows. It is very alien to the British to applaud oneself or one's accomplishments, whereas Americans jump up and down and shout out how proud they are of themselves, this makes British people cringe. However, it makes much more exciting television, so the producers now have got the British to run around arms in the air shouting out and generally looking awkard and embarrassed. Everyone feels the same inside, it's just a difference in expression and probably the one people prefer is the one of the culture they were brought up in. Book Genre: Autobiography, Biology, Health, Medical, Medicine, Memoir, Mental Health, Neuroscience, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science I’m not sure that those statistics are entirely up to date, but in any case this is not a book for hypochondriacs or anyone who worries that their difficulty in remembering film stars’ names might stem from something more troubling than unmemorable film stars. Because the fear it plays on, consciously or not, is the sudden and cruel inversion of normality. 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.

Neurological illness manifests in frequently bizarre symptoms. Some of them are similar enough to previous cases in the doctor's experience that he or she can by inductive reasoning come up with a dead-on diagnosis.Submissions should not have more than 5 authors. (Exception: original author replies can include all original authors of the article) 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. CT imaging scans are everywhere, as illegible to the general viewer as a Rorschach test, but deemed the (often bogus) sine qua non of scientific credibility for all matters psychological. 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 Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell comprehensively explain, through the lived experiences of a number of patients, the complex and sometimes utterly bizarre nature of the brain and the things that can go wrong with it.