“The Laws of Medicine” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book is actually a companion to the author's TED Talk, found here. He gained a lot of popularity as the author of "The Emperor of all Maladies" and "An Intimate History of the Gene" but in contrast to those, this book is very slim and easy to get through. He also speaks frequently about wanting to make science understandable to non-scientists, so don't let that aspect of it scare you off.

I hadn't watched the TED Talk before picking up this book, I just liked that it was a more introspective work about medicine and being a doctor. The focus of this piece is on how uncertain the practice of medicine can be. When you're younger, you think of doctors as just these magic people who can make everything better, but that illusion begins to fade as you get older and realize how imperfect their art is. Mukherjee's response to this was to look for the laws of medicine, the guiding principles. Similar to the laws of physics and chemistry, what did the practice of medicine always follow? (Sidebar: his TED talk is more about medicine in general, and they actually work as separate entities.)

He came up with three rules. The first one: "a strong intuition is better than a weak test". This is about how you need to have a context and a reason for performing tests on people, as false positives are rampant and you need to give the result meaning. Second, "typical results give us rules, outliers give us laws". This leads to a discussion of how even outliers contain meaning in their results, even if the researchers don't like to talk about them. Finally, "behind every perfect study is a perfect human bias". The reality is that we don't know how different treatments will work on everyone, since everyone is different. We can determine trends, but even those have biases towards the upper classes, or white people, or men. 

The end result is that medicine is still a very uncertain practice in the world. And it still needs a human element behind it to use judgement and make choices. This in and of itself is something that I think needs to be talked about more, the fact that doctors are in a field where not much is known and we know the unknowns are coming back to bite us in the end. The laws that he describes here don't only apply to medicine, but also to other studies where they are using tests and trying to parse out the truth (scientific research in general could very easily be grouped in here). And the more we study the more we realize how little we do know about our own bodies.

This short and sweet novel is a really good discussion of that, and one that makes me eager to read Mukherjee's other works as well. Each of the laws is followed by a discussion of science or medicine and how this has applied to the history of medicine, as well as more contemporary anecdotes. It is very readable, but also illuminating. And since it's not too long, it can be finished in a single sitting. I'd highly recommend picking it up if you get the chance!