Reviewed by Laurie Gray for Readers' Favorite

Doctor Confidential: Secrets Behind the Veil by Richard Sheff, MD describes Dr. Sheff’s journey through medical school, internship and residence in family medicine. From dissecting a cadaver as a first-year medical student and making his first fatal error as a sleep-deprived intern to delivering his first baby and dealing with particularly obnoxious patients and supervising physicians, Dr. Sheff reveals the joys and traumas of practicing medicine. Readers experience life and death first-hand by following Dr. Sheff through rotations in psychiatry, gynecology, obstetrics, surgery, internal medicine, and pediatrics. Dr. Sheff shares his personal conflicts and professional dilemmas in a way that exposes some of the systematic failings of health care in the United States, including a shift from helping people heal to performing every technological procedure possible on patients with sufficient insurance coverage.

Dr. Sheff sets a good pace, condensing six years of his life into 342 pages with ample detail to engage a variety of readers while allowing the story to flow. Occasionally a reader might wonder to what extent the author’s present perspective colors his retelling of events that occurred several decades ago, and overall the quality of the content exceeds the quality of the writing. Dr. Sheff balances medical jargon with honest insight and tells a courageous and candid story of what goes on behind the scene at a hospital. Science and technology have advanced exponentially over the past thirty years, but the ethical issues for medical professionals remain essentially the same, because at the end of the day, physicians are still human. Dr. Sheff embraces this humanity and encourages us all to be a little more humane. Those who are disillusioned with our present health-care system and everyone considering the study of medicine would benefit greatly from reading this memoir.