The Anatomy of Hope

     I just finished reading The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman, M.D. This book is absolutely wonderful, and I highly recommend it, especially to all those working in health professions. Through Groopman's encounters with many extraordinary people, several of them patients, he seeks to answer why some people find and sustain hope during difficult circumstances, while others do not. Spanning thirty years of experience, starting from the time he was a medical student, Groopman's critical observations, deep compassion, and appreciation for the human condition are touching and astounding. 

About the author: 
Jerome Groopman has been a staff writer in medicine and biology for The New Yorker since 1998. He is also the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and author of four books. He has published approximately 150 scientific articles and has written several Op-Ed pieces on medicine for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic. He is a hematology oncologist. 


My favorite excerpt from the book: 
     "True hope, then, is not initiated and sustained by completely erasing the emotions, like fear and anxiety, that are often its greatest obstacles. An equilibrium needs to be established, integrating the genuine threats and dangers that exist into the proposed strategies to subsume them. So when a person tells me that he doesn't want to know about the problems and risks, that he believes ignorance is necessary for bliss, I acknowledge that yes, unbridled fear can shatter a fragile sense of hope. But I assert that he still needs to know a minimum amount of information about his diagnosis and the course of his problem; otherwise, his hope is false, and false hope is an insubstantial foundation upon which to stand and weather the vicissitudes of difficult circumstances. It is only true hope that carries its companions, courage and resilience, through. False hope causes them to ultimately fall by the wayside as reality intervenes and overpowers illusion. 
     Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope, because a tumor has not always read the textbook, and a treatment can have an unexpectedly dramatic impact. This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope."
     -Jerome Groopman, M.D.