The End of Healing

Eye-opening and dismaying! Nevertheless, Mr. Bailey gives us an accurate and compelling look at the wreckage of the American health care system in detail. He is compassionate and caring, a voice for all of us. Must-read!

Against the backdrop of a continuing national debate about healthcare access and costs, stories about $17,850 urine tests, and confused and bewildered health consumers, I couldn’t help but pick up The End of Healing, a new novel by Dr. Jim Bailey, (Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center). This Benjamin Franklin Silver Award Winner in the popular fiction category provides a well-researched descent into the inner workings of American healthcare through parallels with Dante's Inferno. It's compelling in the best activist tradition of Upton Sinclair and as heartfelt and thought-provoking as the work of Atul Gawande. Dr. Bailey specifically wrote The End of Healing as a novel, because he felt that stories can more powerfully give voice to the lived experiences of patients and their health care providers than yet another scholarly article. He’s also a clinician who cares for the sick and teaches doctors; one who is on a mission to heal rifts the current system causes and preserve the patient/physician relationship. As a result, the information contained in his character, Dr. Virgil Sampson’s fictional Health System Science Program and syllabus, portrays a factual, documented history of how American medicine has evolved. Taking his advice to “Follow the money!” leads the characters and the reader down a rabbit hole that’s anything but fiction. Librarians will appreciate that the syllabus reflects the actual documentation for Dr. Bailey’s own research and sources.
I’m not recommending this book for it’s fiction storyline, because it is not as polished in that way as one by a favorite fiction author would be. The format serves as a vehicle to draw the reader in, artfully weaving the story around actual medical histories and composites of real cases, while revealing the complexities and forces driving healthcare delivery in the US today. Health care providers will recognize some of the anguishing situations they’ve found themselves in and patients may well find answers to questions about their own care and experiences. That is where the value lies for librarians. We are able to understand the challenges all parties in the system face and can think about ways to bridge gaps between patients and providers, through resources, programming, collaborative efforts, conversations – whatever might help meet the needs of our communities. This book within a book does much more than entertain, it effectively serves as a call to action.

*This review was published in the April 2018 issue of OHSLA Voice