A Look Back

Book 1 describes some fun times---and some difficult times. Dr. Wade tells us of his mainly lucky teen years. He also tells us about his mother's horrible iron deficiency (that many women suffer and unfortunately go undiagnosed) and how to diagnose it. In addition, he tells us how to decide if a medication, surgery, or merely observation is the best or the worst thing to do. He then talks about his wonderful father. Book 2 is about one of the main pursuits of Dr. Wade's professional...
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Book 1 describes some fun times---and some difficult times. Dr. Wade tells us of his mainly lucky teen years. He also tells us about his mother's horrible iron deficiency (that many women suffer and unfortunately go undiagnosed) and how to diagnose it. In addition, he tells us how to decide if a medication, surgery, or merely observation is the best or the worst thing to do. He then talks about his wonderful father. Book 2 is about one of the main pursuits of Dr. Wade's professional career, which was his attempt to improve the care of patients by using a better method of diagnosis. In other words a method to make the correct diagnosis, accurately and quickly. The correct diagnosis is pivotal to excellent care---all else, the tests, the medications, any surgery, all depend on having a correct diagnosis. To accomplish that goal, Dr. Wade authored a book and then developed a computerized differential diagnosis program. The book is an extensive compendium of the causes for thousands of symptoms, signs, and test results. The computer diagnosis program, within seconds, gives the doctor a list of the more likely diagnoses for hundreds of symptoms, signs, and abnormal test results; and lists them in a decreasing order of probability. A knowledgeable doctor can in just a few seconds go down the list and decide what to do next. However, doctors would not use this program. Instead, they relied on their memory, a notoriously fallible approach to the huge number of diagnostic possibilities. Book 2 and subsequent books describe the frustrations, the obstacles, the illogic, the inconsistencies, the hostility, and the disbeliefs Dr. Wade encountered over the years while trying to convince doctors to use his program. Book 3 describes his college years, med school, the San Francisco University of California Internship at the San Francisco General Hospital, the Navy in San Diego and the Western Pacific, his lovely and brilliant wife, much more about medical care in the USA, and his medical practice. Book 4 describes Dr. Wade's opening his medical practice and the experiences during those years. It also continues with his experiences trying to get doctors to use his computer-assisted diagnosis program, his web site, his numerous promotions, and his suggestions on how to cut health care expense by billions of dollars, still deliver excellent care, and still cover everybody. Then his last chapter on how discouraged with the medical profession he has become, but that he still has hopes it will all change for the better---soon. Many of the vignettes sprinkled through the book are medically instructive---and many are merely fun for the author to recall. We hope the reader enjoys the book, and learns something from it. "Satus est initius mederi quam fini." (It is better to doctor at the beginning than at the end.) Erasmus