Sandeep Jauhar

Sandeep Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend’s incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people’s lives directly. Once situated at a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his induction into the profession. Jauhar’s conception of doctoring and medicine changed during those first eighteen months as he asked all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are asking—and reached satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine. Today he is a thriving cardiologist and the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He writes regularly for the New York Times. He lives with his wife and their son and daughter on Long Island.

Jauhar's new book is Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician.

From his Q & A with Evi Heilbrunn at U.S. News & World Report:

In the book, you talk a lot about the business culture of American medicine. What does that mean for physicians today?

"Medicine is a field about caring for other people, so most people go into medicine either because they are fascinated by human physiology either/or because they want to care for people. I don’t believe that people go into medicine to get rich so it's a rude awakening when you have to start thinking about money. [Now] you have to think about the bottom line. It's about attaining a certain base income. Doctors have to start thinking about business things and if you don't want to think about it, you’re constantly reminded. You’re constantly being measured by how many RVUs [relative value units] you're bringing in, so even if you're on the academic side, the employer is reminding you [about money]. That kind of commercial consciousness is invading the profession."

Do you see this knowledge trickling down into medical training?

“When I was a third year resident, I...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Sandeep Jauhar's website.

The Page 69 Test: Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.

The Page 99 Test: Doctored.

--Marshal Zeringue