"Tell the doctor where it hurts." It sounds simple enough, unless the problem affects the very organ that produces awareness and generates speech. What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Reaching Down the Rabiit Hole, Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:
• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth living
How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.
"[A] bustling ballad from the front lines of medicine. . . . Walking the halls and emergency room of a major teaching hospital-[Ropper] is Oliver Sacks on horseback. This is a fascinating, sometimes brutal reality show of how disease presents, how diagnoses are made, and treatments rendered. Always at the forefront is dedication to doing what is best for the patient. . . . This book should be read by those with an interest in the brain, patients and families who struggle with life-threatening illness, and by all of us as potential sufferers who will appreciate the efforts made for them. It is a gem."
Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Dean Emeritus, Harvard Medical School
