Neurology Rounds With The Maverick:
Adventures with Patients from the Golden Age of Medicine
Author: Bernard M. Patten, MD
Publisher: Identity Publications, location unknown, 2019
The author’s credentials are “par excellence” – Undergraduate from Columbia College summa cum laude; MD from Columbia University; Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Royal Society of Medicine, Texas Neurological Society, and American Academy of Neurology; and certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Practical work experience too long to list, but Bernard Patten is not shy about telling it to you throughout his book.
In fact, he is anything but shy. This is one of many books he has authored, but the first one I’ve read. His style is bold, taking no prisoners when it comes to arguments, and pulling no punches when it comes to describing situations and events. We could hope he really did not talk like that to patients or colleagues or supervisors – but alas we would be disappointed. This guy was born a “maverick” and it suited him well throughout his career and beyond as he now takes up writing.
His emphasis throughout the book is “facts” and where there are no facts, there should be no assumptions. He applies this to his field, but also the media, big companies, and medical institutions – with considerable success.
But here’s why Patten wrote the book. He wants this book’s shared knowledge to increase the reader’s intensity and range of experience – for the purpose of examining and clarifying one’s life and the lives of others. He will have succeeded if after reading it, the reader will be able to decide for themselves, “if it is better for a doctor to function at the junction of art and science and practice medicine NOT as a STRANGER, or is it better for a doctor to enter the survival mode, knuckle under, and muddle through. . . to your detriment. . . Decide: is it better to let your insurance company make medical decisions for you or better to let your doctor?”
Patten’s career was based on getting complete histories of his patients and relating to them as friends, giving them the time, the attention, and the honesty, they need. He was a master at that. On the other hand, while modern medical advances have saved millions of lives, almost all of today’s doctors are more concerned about covering their butts from lawsuits and understandably so.
Time after time, Patten presents a case from his experience, really scores of them, gives you all the facts, medical and otherwise, and then says, “Attention reader: your diagnosis, please. How would you handle this situation and this patient? How would you handle her/his family?” Often, I felt I was part of a TV’s Dr. House episode.
The lesson about work and research and evidence and thinking are all outlined clearly in the text – you can’t miss them. And they’re great lessons that can be applied to anyone’s life. Two examples (garnished with the author’s sense of humor) follow.
Lesson: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you see it, you may believe it. If you don’t see it, you don’t know. If you don’t know, then suspend judgment.
Lesson: This is important: turning off the respirator makes the brain dead. It doesn’t prove the brain was dead before the respirator was turned off.
Patten is not a big fan of insurance companies and he explains with real cases, why not.
He has an approach-avoidance conflict with the existence of God, prayer, afterlife, heaven, or hell. For the most part, he appears to ridicule all believers in those things. But when they work in his favor, he seems to be thankful for them. As for miracles, he would tell you that he is the miracle-worker and he gets very ticked off when people give God the credit, although he does admit that is a weakness in his character. So, you understand where he’s coming from. He worked in the age when people did see their doctors as at least a ‘god’ – I remember them well. In his case, he actually believed it, or so he leads you to think. I must, however, admit he has a great response to a patient who thinks God is telling her to kill her clients.
Patten is also very opinionated on the issue of the media, to the point where I wonder what planet he’s from when he says Fox News in his opinion, “is almost all false witness and false information.” He also is no fan of the current President, yet in his own life, time and again, he acts like him and brags about it. He would have done well to leave politics out of his book, but alas, he has reached the point where he feels he has no need to impress anybody, considering he was freed from such troublesome conditions earlier in life. With that freedom, he proceeds to tell jokes throughout his stories (some not so funny) and some quite surprising coming from a doctor. While I’m at it, if you squirm at the talk of sex (even when it is related to medicine) this book may make you a little uncomfortable.
At the same time, Patten has some great lines. One example is, “There is free speech in America, but you have to pay a price for it.”
He is not a big fan of TV, often yelling out at live cameras, “If you are watching, you are damaging your brain. TV is junk food for the mind.” And on ‘reality’, he writes, “Oh well, reality is nice to visit, but most Americans can’t live there and wouldn’t want to live there even if they could. That’s one of the reasons people watch TV – to get away from the realities of life. In modern America, we have escapism on a planetary scale.” The context is well worth the price of the book.
But then again, so is just about every one of the 32 chapters or tableaus as he calls them.
His biggest disappointment though is the reception his research in the area of breast implants received from his medical colleagues, many of whom thought he was just plain wrong in his findings. But when asked if they had read the published work, they responded they had not, but got all they needed from TV. Bummer to say the least.
Before I tell you this book is a must read – for doctors, patients, families of patients, hospital administrators, government health officials – let me just mention a few of the topics he covers: Aristotle Onassis; a horse admitted to hospital for humans (yes, you read correctly); placebos; mistakes; patients predicting their own death accurately; malpractice suits; and breast implants (including what happened to famous celebrities like Pamela Anderson Lee, Mary Tyler Moore, Cher, and others.
Patten ends his book with some advice for any potential scientists who may pursue research into the consequences of implant materials and techniques. I’ll let you discover that on your own.
Here’s my advice on the book: First -- read it. We all need to better understand the worlds of hospital administrators, doctors (surgeons vs. medical team), labs (and what often goes wrong). This book provides that understanding and more. Second – if you’re a God-believing person, don’t stop praying for your loved ones who are under the care of doctors for serious ailments or diseases. Regardless of what Patten himself thinks, his book clearly proves the need for divine intervention – certainly in term of discernment, diagnosis, and treatment – in this very business- and finance- driven world.
Most highly recommended.
n Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, October 2, 2019, www.accordconsulting.com
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