Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

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Neurological illness manifests in frequently bizarre symptoms. Some of them are similar enough to previous cases in the doctor's experience that he or she can by inductive reasoning come up with a dead-on diagnosis. Full Book Name: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Told in a breezy style through a series of real-life case studies, Ropper's book offers a fascinating glimpse of the ways in which our brain can go wrong. * Financial Times * Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole does not particularly try to be funny, yet its commentary on how events happen to arrange themselves has a comic sensibility. Ropper's mirthless exchange of one-liner jokes with a hospital visitor who turns out to be a former comedy writer establishes a fellowship between the men and helps us understand the origins of this show business take on clinical neurology.

Allan Ropper's new memoir, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, has the hard-boiled style of a Raymond Chandler novel. Like a real-life Dr House, Ropper follows hunches and has sudden startling insights. * The Times * Submissions should not have more than 5 authors. (Exception: original author replies can include all original authors of the article) Reading this is like being a fly on the wall in a neurology ward. There are some real characters, and some real highs and lows. It’s in part an eye opening education and part like watching a car crash. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is a really fascinating book. It's a little fictionalised, so we get dialogues and little portraits of character, enough that we can care about the cases discussed. Dr Ropper is pretty much everything an ideal doctor should be: knowledgeable, capable of acting fast, capable of explaining complex processes clearly, intuitive, willing to listen, willing to admit he's wrong... At every stage, he emphasises to the reader and to the residents he's teaching that each case is individual, that the right answer for one person isn't the right one for the next, and so on.I wish I was smart enough to become a doctor because I think their work is so interesting particularly neurology. Dr. Ropper, Reaching Down The Rabbit Hole makes this point with his tales of the variety of illnesses, accidents, and medical conditions neurologists treat. He calls neurology the Queen of medicine because of its diversity.

A moderately interesting story of the life of a neurologist, marred by the gigantic ego of the author. I'm sure you need a gigantic ego to do the job and there are plenty of stories where he gets stuff wrong (at first, before getting it right obv) but the overall impression is of being sat next to someone at a dinner party who starts off seeming an absolutely fascinating and enthralling raconteur and by the third course you're wondering who you ought to stab in the eye with a dessert fork: yourself or him. But where ultimately do these journeys lead? What lies at the other end of the rabbit hole except the uncomfortable knowledge that who we are and all that we hold certain is precariously contingent?

Something I learned from the book. That what a patient reports are symptoms and they are all subjective, things we feel, and have to be taken at face value. But what a doctor sees are signs, and they are objective. I'd never thought of it that way. Put the two together and you are on your way to a diagnosis. CT imaging scans are everywhere, as illegible to the general viewer as a Rorschach test, but deemed the (often bogus) sine qua non of scientific credibility for all matters psychological. I’m not sure that those statistics are entirely up to date, but in any case this is not a book for hypochondriacs or anyone who worries that their difficulty in remembering film stars’ names might stem from something more troubling than unmemorable film stars. Because the fear it plays on, consciously or not, is the sudden and cruel inversion of normality. I liked Dr Ropper, he came across nicely and informally, but his ego can get a bit wearisome after a while. I am trying not to hold the whole ego thing against him, after all he is a neurologist and fair enough he does an amazing job that very few people can or would choose to do. While Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the source of the title, the theme of implausible reality in neurologic practice comes from the White Queen of Through the Looking-Glass. Neurology is queen of the medical specialties, says Ropper. Like Wells, a queen among Gothic cathedrals, she is neither the biggest nor necessarily the best but few exceed her for finesse and elegance.

All up, if you’re interested in the brain in all its mysterious glory you should probably keep this book on your radar. I've rounded up the book from a very precise 2.75 to a 3 because it wasn't a bad read, just not a very good one.Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, by Dr Allan Ropper and BD Burrell, is very much in the latter tradition. Ropper is a distinguished neurologist at Harvard Medical School. He has many fascinating tales to tell, but he doesn’t. Burrell does. Or at least Burrell is the prose man, turning Ropper’s professional stories into tight little homilies of neurological and existential meaning.

urn:lcp:reachingdownrabb0000ropp_l7b0:epub:92c2fff5-a301-4e3e-849e-845a7902dcb9 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier reachingdownrabb0000ropp_l7b0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t31350j3g Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781782395478 Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole tells it like it is on the front line of clinical neurology. Engagingly written, informative, often funny, it also manages to be moving without slipping into the sentimentality that too often infests medical writing... If ever anything goes wrong with my brain, I'd like a doctor like Ropper to help sort me out. -- Paul Broks * Daily Telegraph * When all his colleagues think a patient is suffering from a brain tumour or a stroke, Ropper knows that it’s herpes encephalitis. He doesn’t need to look at scans. He can tell from a bedside exam. Nevertheless, there are some wonderful accounts of rare cases, such as the young Asian Korean woman who was fuming like she has rabies. That definitely requires an experienced eye to make an accurate and prompt diagnosis, and to prevent further damage to the patient's physical functioning and quality of life.

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There were some technical details here, I didn't get it all of course, I have no history in medicine but I understood enough for the stories to make sense even without that knowledge. I wasn’t keen on the way it jumps around and between cases of similar illnesses but I get why he did it, it just didn’t work for me. Book Genre: Autobiography, Biology, Health, Medical, Medicine, Memoir, Mental Health, Neuroscience, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science Filled with patient histories and puzzling symptoms waiting to be understood, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is a detective novel, and despite his flapping white coat and squeaking Crocs, Ropper is Humphrey Bogart, cerebral yet tough and blessed with a terse wit. -- Christian Donlan * New Statesman * You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.