Synopses & Reviews
A radical new understanding of how medicine is best practiced, from the award-winning author of God’s Hotel.
Over the years that Victoria Sweet has been a physician, "healthcare" has replaced medicine, "providers" look at their laptops more than at their patients, and costs keep soaring, all in the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. Yet the remedy that economists and policy makers continue to miss is also miraculously simple. Good medicine takes more than amazing technology; it takes time — time to respond to bodies as well as data, time to arrive at the right diagnosis and the right treatment.
Sweet knows this because she has learned and lived it over the course of her remarkable career. Here she relates unforgettable stories of the teachers, doctors, nurses, and patients through whom she discovered the practice of Slow Medicine, in which she has been both pioneer and inspiration. Medicine, she helps us to see, is a craft and an art as well as a science. It is relational, personal, even spiritual. To do it well requires a hard-won wisdom that no algorithm can replace — that brings together "fast" and "slow" in a truly effective, efficient, sustainable, and humane way of healing.
Review
"Through the moving stories of patients and her experiences in medical school, [Sweet] explores how she found a compassionate way to care. A thoughtful companion to one of today’s hot-button issues." Good Housekeeping
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"[A] master storytellerhighly readable…the sick will take comfort in this physician’s warm, personal, knowledgeable approach." Kirkus Reviews
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"Anybody considering medical school, or already toiling there, has to read this book. Everyone else should too…[Sweet’s] memoir of growing slowly into her calling is about learning not just to save lives but to make a life…Her personal odyssey is more stirring than any polemical manifesto could be." The Atlantic
About the Author
Victoria Sweet was a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital for more than twenty years, an experience she chronicled in God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. An associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, she is also a prizewinning historian with a Ph.D. in history and social medicine, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.