A gripping medical novel
Bewertet mit 4.5 Sternen
“If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?” (151)
How many, indeed? And how many actually die?
“Brain on Fire” is a great book, in which Susannah Callahan, a young journalist at the New York Post, describes her experience with a mystery illness, causing, among other things, seizures, hallucinations, and paranoia. When doctors can’t find the cause of her problems, they quickly turn to psychological explanations or, in one case, just diagnose alcohol abuse without any good reason. This particular patient though has been very lucky in finding a doctor who believes in her and finds out what is wrong with her in the end.
The author does a splendid job narrating her symptoms, her anguish, and her long road to discovery, while at the same time providing fascinating insights to the fields of neurology and auto-immune diseases. The book is gripping and the author is very likeable.
She also reflects on the fact that it is most likely her privileged social position that has saved her life. She has a good job, is white, highly educated, has very supportive and affluent parents, and, last but not least, a good health insurance. It is frightening how even someone like this threatens to fall through the net of the health care system, which is, as she says, not designed to deal with difficult diseases that take lots of time and effort to diagnose and treat. Some more context on the practices leading to misdiagnoses and the injustices and inequalities of the US health care system in particular would have been great. Still, this is a splendid book!