An Authentic Medical Thriller: First, Do No Harm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) May 18, 2011 -- Dr. Joseph Polk is an intelligent, charismatic, and powerful member of the medical staff at Brier Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. This once brilliant physician, a functional psychopath for most of his career, has decompensated.

Nurses and front-line physicians see Polk’s indifference, incompetence, and stubborn cruelty, but the medical staff and the hospital administration are willfully blind. Patients suffer, and worse.

Jack Byrnes has finally completed his training in Intensive Care Medicine and joins Brier Hospital’s medical staff. Jack knows how to care for patients, but he’s woefully unprepared to deal with Joe Polk, the medical staff, enraged nurses, and the hospital’s administration.

The strength of First, Do No Harm lies in the authenticity of the medical setting and the struggles of patients and physicians. Joe Polk is a very different kind of villain.

For twenty-three years, Larry Gold practiced medicine at one of the finest community hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area. He actively participated in quality assurance programs evaluating physician performance while serving as Chief of Internal Medicine. In caring for patients and supervising physicians, Larry saw both the best and worst of medicine. Through First, Do No Harm, Larry shares these experiences to the reader so they can understand the emotional gratification, the frustration, and the outrage that’s intrinsic to medical practice today.

Good fiction teaches and First, Do No Harm, while entertaining, provides object lessons on being a patient and the risks inherent in evaluating your own physician whose missteps can be dangerous or worse.

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