Dr. Brian Goldman

As a veteran emergency room physician, Dr. Brian Goldman has a successful career setting broken bones, curing pneumonia, and otherwise pulling people back from the brink of medical emergency. He always believed that caring came naturally to physicians. But time, stress, errors, and heavy expectations left him wondering if he might not be the same caring doctor he thought he was at the beginning of his career. He wondered what kindness truly looks like—in himself and in others. In The Power of Kindness, Goldman leaves the comfortable, familiar surroundings of the hospital in search of his own lost compassion. A top neuroscientist performs an MRI scan of his brain to see if he is hard-wired for empathy. A researcher at Western University in Ontario tests his personality and makes a startling discovery. Goldman then circles the planet in search of the most empathic people alive, to hear their stories and learn their secrets. He visits a boulevard in São Paulo, Brazil, where he meets a woman who calls a homeless poet her soulmate and reunited him with his family; a research lab in Kyoto, Japan, where he meets a lifelike, empathetic android; and a nursing home in rural Pennsylvania, where he meets a therapist at a nursing home who has an uncanny knack of knowing what’s inside the hearts and minds of people with dementia, as well as her protege, a woman who talked a gun-wielding robber into walking away from his crime. Powerful and engaging, The Power of Kindness takes us far from the theatre of medicine and into the world at large, and investigates why kindness is so vital to our existence.

Why Empathy Is Essential in Everyday Life

The Power of Kindness

Dr. Brian Goldman is both an emergency room physician at Mount Sinai and a prominent medical journalist. Never one to shy away from controversy, Goldman specializes in kicking open the doors to the medical establishment, revealing what really goes on behind the scenes -- and in the minds of doctors and nurses. In The Night Shift, Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an ER after midnight: late-night revellers injured on their way home after last call, teens assaulted in the streets by other teens and a woman who punches another woman out of jealousy over a man. But Goldman also reveals the emotional, heartbreaking side of everyday ER visits: adult children forced to make life and death decisions about critically ill parents, victims of sexual assault, and mentally ill and homeless patients looking for understanding and a quick fix in the twenty-four-hour waiting room. Written with Goldman’s trademark honesty and with surprising humour, The Night Shift is also a frank look at many issues facing the medical profession today, and offers a highly compelling inside view into an often shrouded world.

Real Life In The Heart Of The Er

The Night Shift

The national bestseller from the host of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art—now in paperback! In the high-pressure and complex setting of health care, a new approach to teamwork is leading to healthier patients, happier staff and more efficient operations. Doctors are learning art appreciation to improve diagnostic skills. Hospitals are adopting airplane-style “black boxes” in operating rooms to reduce errors and create better teams. And lessons from the medical world are helping to build better teamwork outside hospitals. Through board games like Friday Night at the ER, Fortune 500 companies and other organizations are learning that running a busy emergency room provides valuable insight that can help anyone who is part of a team, or leads one, to be more effective. Although a group is not a team, any group can become a team. Drawing on groundbreaking research, including how to leverage the science of team building, Brian Goldman offers teachable strategies and examples from around the world that can make us all work better together.

How We Can All Work Better Together

The Power of Teamwork

NATIONAL BESTSELLER All of us have visited the doctor or sat in the emergency room for long hours awaiting treatment. When we finally do reach the other side of the swinging doors, we enter into what seems like another world, with practitioners in white coats and scrub suits speeding from patient to patient, consulting with one another amid controlled chaos. Beneath the cacophony of medical equipment and routine codes announced over the loudspeaker, doctors and nurses use a kind of secret language, usually out of earshot of their patients but sometimes in front of them. The words you'll learn in this book are not expressions that you'll likely find in a medical textbook or even hear on a television show. In fact, most health professionals would rather you didn't know that this underground language exists at all. In The Secret Language of Doctors, bestselling author Dr. Brian Goldman pulls back the curtain to reveal some of medicine's darkest modern secrets, decoding the colourful and clandestine expressions doctors employ to describe difficult patients, situations and medical conditions—and sometimes even other colleagues. You'll discover what it means to exhibit the symptoms of "incarceritis," what "blocking" and "turfing" are, and why you never want to be diagnosed with a "horrendoma." In the process, you'll gain profound insight into what doctors really think about their patients' personalities and even their chances of making it out of the hospital alive. Highly accessible, biting, funny and entertaining, The Secret Language of Doctors reveals modern medical culture at its best and all too often at its worst.

Dr. Brian Goldman

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