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9781587298004

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With this new book, Watts takes his place among the most eloquent of modern physician-writers, casting a clear and honest light on the medicine of today, its absurdities, its limitations, its power, and its grace. The Orange Wire Problem captures it all with a signature eloquence and wit. If you are a physician, it will give you new eyes. If you are not, it will offer you a deeper understanding of medicine as a way of life. - RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, author, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings

With this new book, Watts takes his place among the most eloquent of modern physician-writers, casting a clear and honest light on the medicine of today, its absurdities, its limitations, its power, and its grace. The Orange Wire Problem captures it all with a signature eloquence and wit. If you are a physician, it will give you new eyes. If you are not, it will offer you a deeper understanding of medicine as a way of life. - RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, author, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings

Lyrical riffs on illness, frailty and the meaning of life, as seen through a physician's eyes.A poet, musician and teacher who also practices medicine, Watts (Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters Between Patient and Healer, 2005, etc.) belongs to the growing ranks of doctor-essayists. Readers should not expect lucid journalistic analyses a la Jerome Groopman or Atul Gawande, however; Watts's approach is intensely literary. In one of the essays, the author discusses a patient whose cancer was so advanced by the time of its diagnosis that he was too ill to be treated, despite his intense desire for treatment; finally, the author administered a placebo. Another patient suffered a painful chronic illness, but was also needy and wildly psychotic. Watts recorded their exchanges, as well as the interminable, incoherent messages she left on his answering machine. Employing stream-of-consciousness imagery to depict how a teaching hospital's routine turned a woman's delivery into a miserable experience, the author intersperses a few of his poems. At times, Watts turns up insightful observations on his profession. Though there was no subpoena appended to a letter requesting information on a patient who died two years earlier, Watts worried, Doctors motor along with a little fear of litigation in the sidecar. He observed the patient's chart and mused that it represented all that remained of a human being. When a confused patient heard from the author that she didn't require surgery, but a second opinion from a specialist seemed to urge it, Watts explained that she had actually received similar advice filtered through the personalities of two different physicians.Often illuminating, though the more elaborate passages may strike some as showing off. (Kirkus Reviews)

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David Watts practices medicine in San Francisco. A poet, musician, television host, and teacher, he is the author of Bedside Manners: One Doctor's Reflections on the Oddly Intimate Encounters between Patient and Healer, Blessing, Making, Taking the History, and Slow Walking at Jennery-by-the-Sea. He produced Healing Words: Poetry and the Art of Medicine, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in the summer of 2008.

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