Audiobook7 hours
Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases
Written by Cory Franklin, MD
Narrated by John Pruden
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Filled with stories of strange medical cases and unforgettable patients culled from a thirty-year career in medicine, Cook County ICU offers listeners a peek into the inner workings of a hospital. Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Muchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication. Surprising, darkly humorous, heartwarming, and sometimes tragic, these stories provide a big-picture look at how the practice of medicine has changed over the years, making it a must-listen for patients, doctors, and anyone with an interest in medicine.
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Reviews for Cook County ICU
Rating: 4.356382968617021 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
188 ratings15 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed listening to this book. Good sense of humor and interesting stories.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed the stories!! The author has a great point about HIPAA at the end .
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I feel like the book has the emotional intelligence of a 10 year old. No depth to any of the stories.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The last few chapters were very thought provoking . Be sure to read to the end
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Really enjoyed this book, the author is funny and passionate. Excellent insight into the medical profession.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very down to earth look at a physicians journey through medical school and then following his career journey through his work at the largest not for profit hospital. The author is very candid and doesn’t take himself too seriously. Enjoyed the narrators voice too.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5ok, read trauma room two, its a much better read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In a word...FANTASTIC!!!! Loved all his stories and how they were delivered. The book also provided a lot of food for thought
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A fascinating read for those of us who are not part of the medical professionals, more specifically, of the hospital medical professionals.
The author gives an insider's account of what he encountered during his years as a doctor in Chicago's Cook County ICU. Far from being a boring or pedantic narration, the book paints a humane way of receiving and treating patients. It is not by all means, a rosy picture, describing all sorts of ills and harms that can befall a human being, but manages to avoid the gory, sensationalist aspect it could have easily taken.
I loved that doctor Cory Franklin, not only shared his experience through striking anecdotes which he has either heard of or experienced, but he also illustrated them with either literary quotes or lyrics from certainly his favorite songs.
It's a genuine advocacy for a patient-centered medical care which we would do well to take heed of as it seems more and more lacking in this day and age. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As a medical professional, I love this book since I myself could relate to the era of medicine that has gone by and sadly replaced by this billion dollar money making industry that it has become which does not always (or usually) have the patients' best interest at heart. It remains very difficult to motivate the younger generation of doctors to "do better by/ for their patients" and not just for their wallets or the bureaucracy that their entangled in.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Entertaining and informative. This is actually the first audio book that I've listened to the whole way through. The reader was very engaging and made the situations come to life with his spirited storytelling. Highly recommended!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found no particular favorite part of the book. I had wanted both the speaker and the stories to be warmer, more personable but they weren’t. This lack may have occurred because I’ve been listening to hospital stories since the 1940’s on radio’s General Hospital. Those stories were emotionally involved but these seemed to be read perfectly but with none of my emotional response occurring. I did gain a lot of new insights and new shareable trivia. Just a good read that held my interest.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life in a famed county hospital of Chicago, quite interesting. It's a fascinating story from a doctor's point of view. He covers thoughts from a doctor fresh out of medical school and thoughts from the perspective of someone who has had a long career as a medical practitioner.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book. It was like having your own TV medical drama without all of the over-the-top or bad acting. Along with the anecdotes he includes, he provides interesting medical information such as chapter 8 concerning alcoholism. You walk along with Dr. Franklin as he does his rounds and get in first hand on his interesting cases, meeting his fascinating patients. Some will make you laugh and some will make you cry. Dr. Franklin doesn't use this book to make himself out to be the perfect doctor. You will see him at his worst and you will see him at his best. But most importantly you will walk away from this book with a good feeling and a little bit more information than you had when you began it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cory Franklin, MD, spent most of his thirty-year career as a doctor in the Intensive Care Unit at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. This book presented vignettes of incidents that happened to him there as well as at other hospitals in other cities while he studied to be a doctor. Through his stories, the reader can gain some insight into how the medical profession works and how and why it has changed. One point that he raised several times was the way medical students, interns, and residents were often bullied by their superiors. While the results could have major effects–not getting admitted to a hospital’s training program or not learning another cause for a medical situation–no explanation was offered for why this happened, how it started, how it permeated the system, or what benefits, if any, it produced. He also discussed the turf wars between internists and surgeons.He also discussed the way hospital personnel, especially doctors, do not see patients as people but as diseases. They miss important information because of that, e.g., stereotyping a patient rather than considering that a condition may be caused by medication. Later on he mentioned how modern medical practices have distanced the doctor and the patients. Underlings do much of the prep work that the doctors used to do. Much work, such as diagnosing, is done with a computer which causes the doctor to be looking at the screen rather than at the patient for much of the examination. COOK COUNTY ICU explained some of the feelings and experiences hospital patients experience. In order for hospitals to run smoothly, patients become infantilized.: They lose control of their environment and freedom and may rebel or react in ways to regain control, e.g., become argumentative or demanding; women may become flirtatious, men may become sexually suggestive. Doctors and nurses who become patients are often the worst offenders because they are more aware of what is happening to them.People or people thought to be poor, confused or had language barriers, had less chance of receiving the same quality of care as did their more respectable counterparts. There is no information about how the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has or has not changed that.The book is filled with examples of problems caused by numerous illnesses, some quite difficult to diagnose. It also briefly addressed the HIV-AIDS beginning when patients with the disease began showing up in the emergency room. Extraneous experiences included being the medical consultant for the movie “The Fugitive” and speaking with the doctor in charge of the emergency room in Memphis when Elvis was brought in.Before World War II, most wealthy people were treated at home. Only the less wealthy went to hospitals and at least half could not pay their bills. The slack was picked up by philanthropic groups and the government. That changed after the war when employers began offering medical insurance to their employees. Medicare entered the picture in the 1960s and in the 1980s, private donors were sought to pay for expansion and new construction. The 2000s brought in mergers and consolidations. Independent community hospitals disappeared. The effect the change became evident on the walls of the corridors. Instead of portraits of prominent doctors who were involved with patient care they were replaced by portraits of administrators and board members and plaques with the names of donors and focused on money.One segment of the medical community did not change: Free clinics. They still faced the same medical and medicinal care problems.But they also had more intrastaff congeniality and more appreciation from their patients.Franklin explains why more doctors consider leaving the profession today and some of the problems caused by more government oversight (e.g. HIPAA rules) and electronic record keeping,The vignettes were interesting and brief. The technical jargon was kept to a minimum and was written so the lay reader could understand it. I found the attempts at writing accents, primarily for New Yorkers and Black people, insulting, condescending, and unnecessary. Franklin made it very clear that he did not like the people he met when he went to New York City for interviews. But his statement that “Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover, “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” is not without some basis assumes that all the readers will be familiar with that cover.I hoped for more content from the book than I found.I received a copy of this book from Goodreads Giveaways.