Rating: 
Summary: A+++ Awesome Catch 22 Internship
Review: A wonderful wildly provocative heartbreaking book. I enjoy the journey of Roy Basch and in his fellow interns dissecting the real world in medicine at the most famous teaching hospital in the country.This book reflects my innermost thoughts-- How alarming & realistic medicine can be which I can relate the irony in medicine inevitably exist in some facets. P.S. My first idiom I learned was "Knock My Socks Off"- which I perfectly describe in this book. Awesome, Provocative, Brilliant with Wild Sense of Humor!!!=).
Rating:
Summary: must read for all interns
Review: I read this book in the middle of internship at a busy NYC hospital, and I believe it is a must read for all interns. The book is about how internship at one of the Harvard Hospitals breaks several interns, who ultimately decide to continue in psychiatry rather than internal medicine. While laws now limit the hours we work and I have yet to see a 'tern broken, several points in the book resonate with me and have made me a better doc!
Most importantly, my #1 goal is to "buff and turf" the patient--meaning get the patient well enough to transfer them away. When other 'terns deviate from this policy, I have watched them get overwhelmed. Other important rules of medicine are reiterated in the book's appendix and are worth reading. Those who are not in medicine but who are curious about the field should also read this book. The characters are great and really portray hospital life accurately. To read this book is to "live through" an internship!
Rating:
Summary: All too real....
Review: In this age of reality TV, many will be fascinated, repelled, disturbed and intrigued about this look in the life of a resident intern at a large teaching hospital. For those in the know, it is a sarcastic yet honest glimpse of the perils of an intern. House of God focuses on Dr. Roy Basch- a new intern who is working at a large teaching institution. Like all interns, he is thrown in with the instruction to "keep the patient alive." He battles grueling schedules, hopeless patients, attendings and disease. He learns from the chief, interns and residents--and even the patients "gomers". For those who are unfamiliar with medical training this book would be very disturbing, but for those of us who know what residents go through...it is surprisingly real. I first read this book as an M4- just about to start July 1st internship. As an M4 you are cocky, arrogant and optimistic and this book was funny, sacriligous even. I read it again after finishing residency and was struck by how honest it was to the residency experience..sometimes painfully so. I liked the book when i first read it, but i can appreciate it more now...It is surprising that the author was able to capture the feelings of interns and be brave enough to put it into book form.
Rating:
Summary: Pure Poison
Review: I'm goint to give you the advice nobody gave me: if you plan on being a doctor, do not read this book until you are well into your residency. Do not read it if you are in pre-med. Do not read it before your internship. This book is the most disconcerting, alarming and depressing books ever written. Shem, brilliant in the art of storytelling, creates a hospital out of hell, where basic human emotions are at loss, where nobody cares, where nobody is responsible or functioning normaly--as a doctor, as a human being. And Shem does this with such force and delivery that you can actually believe that such hellish places exist, that there's no hope or love in hospitals, just a perverted dance with death and despair.
Brilliant book. Wonderful writing. Pure poison.
Rating: 
Summary: GETTHEBOOKGETTHEBOOKGETTHEBOOK!
Review: As a medical professional (a nurse) I loved this book. The boyfriend (a 4th year medical student) and I both agree that this is as close as to the real world as anything else published. Medical people will love it for its dark and real-to-life humor. Lay people will hate it for the same reasons. If you have a significant other in the medical profession- read this book and you will only begin to understand our stories and our frustrations with our job. The boyfriend is giving it to his mom who has absolutely no idea what goes on in between the brick walls of a hospital to help her understand that we aren't calous about our work. When you DAILY work with others hovering over the edge between life an death, the strain can get to you if you can't laugh. And this book will make you laugh, even in its darkest hour.
Rating:
Summary: Gotta read it.
Review: I read this as a first year med student, when everything to come was a great mystery. The world of the training institution (think large, urban teaching hospital here) comes alive in this book, and while it seemed to me at the time that much of it must have been "buffed" by the author to make it more interesting, it turns it out is pretty right on.
I hope it doesn't shatter the readers' confidence in their doctors; what comes accross as a lack of compassion amongst Interns & Residents is just a symptom of the duress of their training ordeal (and their lack of sleep). Happily, excellent skills are usually attained by the concentration of work done, and compassion, if flagging in a few, returns to most all not long after Residency ends.
Rating:
Summary: It's still true
Review: I've read this book twice. Once before starting medical school and now a second time just completing my surgical residency at the House of God West (HOGW). ... Everything in this book is as true in managed care as it was in the transition years of the seventies. I assure you, there is still sex in the hospital, it just involves condoms more than in the free love decade. Maybe less as an intern but from second year on... plenty. The surgical and medical residents' call rooms had a communicating door on the cardiac floor at the HOGW and if that isn't proof well... I can't necessarily recommend this book to laypeople; it's not a work of art. But, every single college student filling out those applications and studying for that MCAT should be *required* to read this book. And to those laypeople who are somehow shocked by the goings on at a teaching hospital: Just make sure you get that DNI/DNR order straightened out before you too become a gome.
Rating:
Summary: Most docs and interns should read this book.
Review: I first read this book at the beginning of my internship (2001) and, though I liked it very much, I found that the author's vision of Medicine was way too dark and bitter. It was more of a novel (like Robin Cook's, but actually good) than anything else for me. (Some spoilers below) Then, I read it again after becoming a doctor. And I don't see this book as a novel anymore. I could relate to almost all of Dr.Basch's (main char) crisis, his initial egomania that made him believe he could 'save the world', his withdrawn from friends and loved ones getting to such point that he'd prefer to hang at the ICU than to be with his girlfriend, seeing his intern friends deteriorate physically and psychologically while unaware of his own decay. I was shocked when I realized I went through a lot of the things he had, including dear people acusing me of being cold and absent. Some doctors say that internship destroys your inner being, others say that it makes it die and reborn like a Phoenix. Anyway, nobody goes through internship all the way without leaving something behind, and sometimes these things might be what you liked most about yourself. Or the ones that liked you. Anyway it is an excellent, fun (very sarcastic) and, now I see, VERY realistic. I love this book and I will likely read it again in a couple of years.
Rating:
Summary: "Purty Gud!"
Review: To heck with this being for med students and interns anyone who deals with patients should read House of God. I remember reading this for the first time in nursing school fifteen years ago. I've read it several more times since then and always find myself laughing out loud. In spite of it being a hilariously funny book it is also a cautionary tale and believe it or not one that I have used daily in my nursing practice. Everytime I lower the bed of a disoriented patient I think of it as preventing a turf to ortho, or (God Forbid) a turf to neuro. When I work with new medical students I often watch them "hearing zebras" and it reminds me to be supportive and helpful. I will honestly say that this book is not for the lay man. It can come across as brutal and unfeeling when in reality the point behind this book is to never stop feeling. Just don't let it kill you and always remember it's probably better to hit 'em with some 'roids. Great Book!
Rating:
Summary: Recommended read for medical students
Review: Recently while we were riding in the car together, my boyfriend was updating me on the condition of his sick grandfather. The week before his grandpa had been hospitalized after a fall, but a CT scan showed an intestinal perforiation. His condition was complicated by the fact that he suffered from diabetes and severe obesity after a lifetime of eating Wisconsin cheese and fried foods on the farm. My boyfriend was upset because the operation had not gone well and the surgeons took hours longer than had been expected. His grandfather was now in the burn unit of the hospital waiting a transfer to the regional medical center. As soon as my boyfriend got this information out about the surgery I immediately started explaining how the surgeons probably had more infection to clean out of the abdomen then they had expected and how his grandfather was probably in the burn unit because the wound could not have been closed up very well on account of it being abdominal surgery that needs to drain, but also that with all of his grandpa's stomach fat it probably just did not close because it's impossible to stitch fat together . . . Argh! Awful, awful me! Here my boyfriend is concerned about his grandfather's life, and I'm rambling on about what little I can guess about the surgery being the "knowledgeable" second year medical student that I am. I didn't even ask how the poor old guy was doing. And worse yet, I didn't realize what I was doing until my boyfriend interrupted me, "Elizabeth, enough! My grandpa is not incisions that won't close or infection! I can't believe you! You haven't even asked me how he's doing. What are you learning in medical school?!" It is this moment in my life, being chastised by someone I love for not showing concern for a patient and his family, that really brought to life for me the book, The House of God. It brought back memories of Berry's concern for Roy as he became unfeeling and emotionless towards the "gomers" that he cares for. The book really illustrated for me how becoming a physician is a process of socialization and so often we are trained out of being caring human beings and turned into analytical, procedure-loving robots, void of feelings or concern. As someone who wants to go into family practice and deal with the "whole patient - mind, body, spirit" I never thought this desensitizing could happen to me - and yet unknowingly I may have lost touch with my nurturing and caring self (if only for a moment). My only criticism about the book is that it only portrays the negative ways in which physicians try to cope with the stresses and insults that medicine deals out each day. One doctor in the book is obsessive/compulsive about running, Roy seems to get his release from sexual exploits, and one young resident even kills himself. While I certainly recognize that this can happen it left me wondering about what I may become and how I could "save myself" from this inevitable demise.
| 
