The Lighthouse Principle: Why Medical Errors Occur - And How to Prevent Them

Every doctor in this book is competent. Every one of them is about to miss something.A woman lies flat on an exam table with a sore throat that isn't a sore throat. A wife mentions, almost in passing, that the family dog has stopped eating. An old sailor returns for the third time with the same pneumonia. In each case the medicine is sound, the reasoning is careful, and the answer is wrong - until someone asks the one question the story was built to make unnecessary.The Lighthouse Principle follows a veteran physician, Dr. Henry Lighthouse, and three generations of the trainees who learn from him - across thirty-six linked cases drawn from four decades at the bedside. These are not puzzles to be solved. They are stories about how skilled clinicians think, where that thinking quietly fails, and how the habit of asking what would make this not what I believe it is passes from one doctor to the next, often without anyone noticing it is being taught.The characters are invented. The errors are not. Every trap in these pages has happened in a real hospital - most of them more than once.Written by a physician of forty years, The Lighthouse Principle is a book about medicine for anyone who has ever been a patient, sat with one, or wondered what actually happens in the space between a symptom and a diagnosis.