My Review of "First Do No Harm" by Lawrence W. Gold
Introduction
If you enjoy medical shows, or even shows or movies that are suspenseful, I highly recommend reading "First Do No Harm," because it is a little bit of both. I downloaded this book and read it in two days. In this review I'll provide a brief plot summary and my impressions of this book.
Plot Summary
"First Do No Harm" by Lawrence W. Gold is the first book in the Brier Hospital Series. It is a medical thriller told from the point of view of Jack Byrnes, an intensive care specialist who has recently arrived at Brier Hospital. He is trained to work with the sickest patients, but unfortunately many of the patients he's seeing are at the hospital are there because of the negligence of one of the more popular physicians, Dr. Joe Polk. Throughout this book many of Dr. Polk's patients wind up in the ICU because of his negligence, however Jack and many other people on staff at Brier Hospital have a hard time getting hospital bureaucracy to see that, because he's very popular with HMOs because of his ability to see many patients in a short amount of time, and he's also popular with a lot of the patients he sees in his practice. He is however not very popular with nurses, because of his attitude toward them, and because he ignores their recommendations. He also often ignores pages, or doesn't respond to them until hours later, which is not a good thing for a doctor to be doing. After being arrested when one of his patients died when her death could have been prevented, Dr. Polk starts to go on a downward spiral.
My Impression of the Book
I love stories that are suspenseful, as well as those which have a medical theme, and this one has both, which is why I was able to read this entire book in two days. However, if you plan to purchase the Kindle edition of the book, I should mention that when I first purchased this book back in December 2012, I found several grammatical as well as spelling errors in the book. Also the Kindle version of the book was both right and left justified, so that there are margins on both the right and left sides - this threw the spacing off. If it weren't for the fact that the storyline had me glued to the book, I probably would have not finished reading it. The book may have been updated by now, however. Grammatical errors and spacing issues aside, I did enjoy this book, and I have since read other books by Lawrence W. Gold.
