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

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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.

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. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease What are you watching?" Hannah asked Vincent, in an inflection she would later inform me was Kansan rather than Missourian.All went well for two years, until she returned to the hospital with sudden right facial drooping and difficulty finding words, sure signs of another stroke, but this time a stroke of a very different kind. A portion of one of the language centers of her brain had been deprived of its blood supply. Her speech was now noticeably impaired. Within a few days, she showed signs of improvement, and was again discharged on a blood thinner. 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. 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 * 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. 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.

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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Time and again, characters with boilerplate descriptions – “Lucinda H is a Latina female in her late teens … with short-cropped and spiky hair” – announce themselves with bizarre symptoms that arrive, often without warning, in the most mundane situations.Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18237 Openlibrary_edition 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. 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 We rarely stop to think about how much of our persona is created by the forty-three or so facial muscles at our disposal, especially those that encircle our eyes. When we think of eyes, other than their color, we think mainly about their frame: the lids, lashes, and brows; a squint, a glint, an arched brow, a purposeful asymmetry. We speak with our eyes. We read other people’s faces through a myriad of micro-expressions. One of the cruelties of ALS is that it not only forces its victims onto ventilators, thus robbing them of speech, but it eventually neutralizes most of the facial muscles, reducing the expressive palette to a few basic gestures.”

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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”. 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 *

By Anthony Gross– http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//143/media-143796/large.jpgThis is photograph Art.IWM ART LD 43 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, Link This isn’t a beginners guide to neurology and psychiatry, but it is well explained and rationale is given for decisions made by the author and his team for the care of his patients. 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. I liked Dr Ropper, he came across nicely and informally, but his ego can get a bit wearisome after a while. I am trying not to hold the whole ego thing against him, after all he is a neurologist and fair enough he does an amazing job that very few people can or would choose to do. 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.

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 * In instances of conversion hysteria, the family of the patient is frequently overbearing and probably causal to the symptoms. Some families demand that the neurologist solve this problem right now and provide a solution that will indicate easy treatment with drugs or reassurance that the illness is nothing to worry about at this point in the patient's life. Either solution is rarely the case. The neurologist is often blamed by these families because he or she is regarded as a shaman who can cure all ills and provide happy endings. Somehow the illness becomes the doctor's fault. I was out on the ward at about 9:30 that morning when the call about Cindy Song arrived from the other hospital. PDF / EPUB File Name: Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.pdf, Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.epubVincent knew who he was. He was sharp enough to find himself amusing. Did his colonoscopy earlier in the week bring this on, or, more to the point, did the anesthesia bring it on? My guess is that it was just a coincidence. A straw poll of the team leaned toward a diagnosis of tumor, possibly stroke, maybe a seizure, but they were basing their guesses on Vincent's MRI. I had seen the scans and knew they did not hold the answer. On the other hand, Vincent's wife, who was sitting in an armchair at the foot of his bed, did. Neurologists aren't very nice to each other and to other doctors consulting on a case. There is a lot of ego jousting. The author of this book tries hard to be humble, but it's evident that he has high regard for himself and his abilities and unique diagnoses. Arwen Cleary had been a professional figure skater as a teenager, had retired from the Ice Capades upon its dissolution in 1995, had then raised three children, gotten divorced, and moved with her two younger children to a ranch house in Leominster, a distant suburb, where she worked part-time at a local health club. Her medical history was unremarkable: once a smoker, she had quit ten years earlier. Her travels had taken her no place more exotic than Bermuda and no more distant than Orlando. Her only hospitalizations to that point had been in maternity wards. She was remarkably fit and in seemingly good cardiovascular health, if judged only by her appearance and vital signs. But shortly after a visit to a chiropractor, she had suffered a vertebral artery dissection, a form of stroke.