by Kate O'Leary

Created on: April 23, 2010

Uncommon Wisdom by John E. Castaldo M.D and Lawrence P. Levitt M.D should be read by anyone who is involved in the health care system as a doctor, as a patient as an administrator or as a caregiver.  If I was ill or someone I loved was ill I would want these two men to be my doctors.  The book is comprised of chapters written by each doctor and a particular experience he had with his patient except for two chapters which describes the doctors experience as family members of a loved one who is critically ill.

It is apparent in the first few chapters that these two men are brilliant and that they went into medicine for all of the right reasons.  To help people heal and recover and that when there is nothing left to be done to help individuals and their families allow death to come with compassion and dignity and kindness.

Both of these doctors are neurologists so they deal with some of the sickest patients and patients that are perfectly healthy and living a life on their terms and within minutes they are crippled with a stroke or a blunt force head trauma or a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis or something else that will forever change their life and the lives of all of those that they love.  Doctors Castaldo and Dr. Levitt help their patients travel through the changes that come with illness and they do it with compassion and with humor and with knowledge.

This book also allows you to see inside the minds of these two men.  How often they have to make literal life and death decisions in minutes.  Decisions that will determine whether or not their patients will live and if their patients do live their quality of life.  You learn that these decisions are based on years of training and experience and also on gut and faith and prayer.   In fact that was one of my favorite things about this book is that it was very apparent that these two doctors who are men of science are also men of faith.  That after everything they have seen, all of their losses and struggles they still have hope and they still have faith -faith in men and faith in something bigger then themselves.

There are many lessons to be learned from these men and their stories and the are truly lessons of kindness and wisdom and faith.

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