The New York Times Book Review - Sandeep Jauhar
…a wonderful new memoir by Dr. Victoria Sweet. The term "slow medicine" has different interpretations. For some it means spending more time with patients. For others it means taking the time to understand evidence so as to avoid overdiagnosis and overtreatment. For Sweet, it means "stepping back and seeing the patient in the context of his environment," and providing medical care that is "slow, methodical and step-by-step"…Sweet maintains a healthy respect for modern medicine…Dialysis, antibiotics and intensive care units save lives. She knows their power but their limitations, too, and this girds her subtle and insightful commentary.
From the Publisher
"Wonderful...often lyrical...subtle and insightful...Physicians would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for patients from Sweet's book: 'Establishing the correct diagnoses and then getting them off all those unnecessary medications, with their side effects and adverse reactions, took a lot of time, but in the long run it saved way more money than it cost. It was slower but it was better.'" —The New York Times Book Review
“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
“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
“An impassioned plea for a more humane system of healing — and a great read for everyone involved in medicine as patient or practitioner.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Dr. Sweet writes as if she was sitting at our kitchen table, quietly and compassionately teaching about our bodies and our lives.” –New York Journal of Books
“[Sweet] offers an alternative to the tyranny of efficiency at the expense of healing.” –Good Times (Santa Cruz)
“Beautiful…[Sweet’s] prose is clear and direct, with a warmth and intelligence that engages the reader from the book’s first pages, a harrowing description of her father’s near-fatal hospital admission… A sober and lucid examination of what we lose when medicine is shaped by economics and not vocation, when it is informed by litigation and not reverence. One can only hope, and pray, that Sweet is not a prophet crying in the wilderness.” –St. Cloud Visitor
"[A] master storyteller…highly readable… the sick will take comfort in this physician's warm, personal, knowledgeable approach.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Profoundly intimate...Sweet provides a strong and necessary tonic as health care, in all its complexities, remains at the center of the national conversation.” —Booklist
“Sound advice that all involved in health care should heed. [Slow Medicine] will appeal to both professional and lay readers.” —Library Journal
Praise for God's Hotel:
“Transcendent . . . readable chapters go down like restorative sips of cool water, and its hard-core subversion cheers like a shot of gin . . . God’s Hotel [is] a tour de force.” —The New York Times
“A most important book that raises fundamental questions about the nature of medicine in our time. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the ‘business’ of healthcare—and especially those interested in the humanity of healthcare.” —Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Mind’s Eye
Library Journal
09/01/2017
Historian and physician Sweet (medicine, Univ. of California, San Francisco; God's Hotel) has encountered many changes in the medical profession. Medicine has morphed into health care. Physicians are now called providers. Efficiency and cost-effectiveness are more important than taking the time to care for patients. The author knows from experience that technology alone does not cure disease. In fact, says Sweet, it often interferes with good treatment because practitioners are too focused on completing the electronic medical record than caring for the patient in the room. Using case histories and examples from teachers, nurses, patients, and other practitioners, she proposes the practice of slow medicine, noting that it involves both art and science. Taking the time to listen, touch, and fully communicate with patients in addition to using the modern bells and whistles will result in effective, efficient care and healing. VERDICT Sound advice that all involved in health care should heed. This title will appeal to both professional and lay readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/20/17.]—Barbara Bibel, formerly Oakland P.L.
Kirkus Reviews
2017-08-07
A doctor dissatisfied with the modern delivery of health care details how she developed her ideas about how medicine should be practiced.Sweet (Medicine/Univ. of California, San Francisco; God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, 2012), a physician, historian, and master storyteller, has provided an autobiographical prequel to God's Hotel, recounting her years in training to become a doctor and her early experiences treating patients. The moments she highlights here are those that revealed some aspect of what she calls Slow Medicine. Sometimes, it involves nurses and doctors showing calmness, confidence, expertise, and a personal touch; sometimes, it is patients whose treatments provide revelatory moments. Sweet recalls scenes from years ago in full detail, describing settings, physical appearances, and lengthy conversations. These personal scenes, which constitute the bulk of the book, make for a highly readable narrative. While the author appreciates the world of modern "Fast Medicine," with its logic, methods, and technology, she argues that its view of the body as a machine to be fixed would benefit from a consideration of the body as a garden to be tended. Taking time out from clinical work, Sweet studied other medical systems—e.g., ayurvedic, Chinese, folk—and especially the writings of Medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen. The author learned Latin so she could read her work in the original, and it is from her that Sweet takes the concept of viriditas, the healing power of nature. The role of the physician, she writes, is to nourish this power, to remove what is in the way, to see the whole patient in her environment, and to think deeply about her life and figure out what is wrong and what can be changed. Though Sweet's firm belief that Slow Medicine is necessary in today's high-tech world will strike some as impractical, the sick will take comfort in this physician's warm, personal, knowledgeable approach.
