Crisp D.H. The Anatomy of Medical Errors

Indianapolis: Sigma Theta Tau International, 2017. — 229 p.What a story and what a magnificent writer. Donna Helen Crisp tells a story that is unbelievable and, at the same time, captivating and heartbreaking. She is inspired not only by Shakespeare as her muse—and the timeless fates of humanity—but also by her dramatic and inconceivable experiences as a patient. What this book uncovers needs to be made known to the world of patients, healthcare practitioners, healthcare systems, and the larger public. This work is so revealing and so honest in its exposé that all of us in healthcare must admit and surrender to the painful truth of our current callous, corporate model of human health and treatment—whereby the body becomes reduced to the moral status of an object and is no longer a human being.
The author, a vibrant, healthy woman, is innocent and trusting. When she yields to the dominant paradigm, she learns firsthand the reality of medical errors and, perhaps even more importantly, the accompanying disregard of her basic humanity—the disrespect, dehumanization, and dismissive concerns of her, the human on the other side of healthcare.
Crisp’s story, as powerful and painful as it is to read, mirrors what could be anyone’s story, anyone’s reality, anyone’s tragedy. Her story shines a bright light to expose the dominant corporate medical establishment. She highlights the unyielding status quo and the unwillingness of the dominant system to see itself and remedy its inhumane approach to medicine and healthcare. No care, instead of healthcare, occurs in those intimate moments of treatment (at all costs) and the larger protective culture.
Anatomy of Medical Errors dissects the details as well as the landscape of our broken health/sick care model, a system that places treatment
and cure at all costs above any concerns for what is at stake— except, perhaps, saving the egos of practitioners and hospitals that are protected by the underbelly of denial against the true story behind the scenes.
Reading this book is scary, and being a silent, vicarious witness hurts as she takes us into the inferno of her personal journey. Planned and structured as an outpatient procedure, her journey becomes an unending nightmare. It churns my heart, as it will the heart of any one who reads this work.