Grand Rounds

My reads of 2014 have mostly been fiction.To add more non-fiction reads to my bookshelf, I have taken to following friends and people I think have similar tastes to mine on Goodreads. It has turned up fiction gems like "The Martian" which I enjoyed (The protag's conversations with NASA are always fun to read) and then there's Grand Rounds.

Grand Rounds at it's core, is a series of 24 medical case studies which take you through how doctors diagnose and treat medical patients. Much like "House", each case study has a patient and you'll play detective as Dr. Benaroch doles out the clues. He will explain what normally is involved in the review -History of Present Illness (HPI), the basic physical checks - Head, Eyes, Ears, Nose and Throat (HEENT) and other very interesting nuggets of information like how a doctor progresses from student to M.D.

In a  first, I bought this as an audiobook on Audible.com.I had wanted to get this as a ebook on Kindle but it seems to be only available as an audio recording and so today I went running to the lectures. As an aside, I am generally not big on audiobooks but these recordings were the perfect medium for these lectures to be delivered.The case studies today were on cancer and heart attack. Both of them have afflicted my friends and loved ones and as such, the case studies hit closer to home. I, in turn, am emotionally affected by them. 

Emotions aside, lectures 6 and 7 have very informative. I did not know that checking for air passage has been obsoleted in favour of chest compressions in the common CPR. It's also not just a course of diagnosis after diagnosis. For example for the lecture on heart attack, the professor suggests treatments and steps we can take to prevent it. In the same lecture, he also gives a short instruction on how to react to a possible heart attack and with it, an updated CPR lesson. Lecture 8 awaits.