The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science

Siddhartha Mukherjee has an unparalleled way of describing patients humanely. Far from classifying them as mere carriers of diseases, but as people. Something that Osler tirelessly tried to explain to his students: Listen to your patient, he is telling you his diagnosis.
In this book, he goes deeper into showing that despite all the technology - from blood tests, tomography scans, to the recent arrival of AI - medicine remains “a science of uncertainty and an art of probability” as (again) Osler mused. Based on if in three personal laws:
- A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weak test: reinforcing that a good history taking and examination is the most valuable than a random test.
- “Normals” teach us rules; “outliers” teach us laws: demonstrates that every patient is unique
- For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias: that trials are not perfect, as they are done by humans. Likewise, we always have to hunt for our own biases.
Beautiful as a literary work. I recommend reading it for anyone who wants to know how true medicine is practiced.