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Waking Up Blind - Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Harbin MD
Publisher: Langdon Street Press (a division of Hillcrest Publishing Group, Inc.)
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.65
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Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 24811
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 1934938874
Dewey Decimal Number: 617
EAN: 9781934938874
ASIN: 1934938874
Publication Date: December 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Imagine trusting a doctor--with the best reputation in the state--to do surgery on your eyes. Now imagine the worst of outcomes. Blindness in an eye that you learn, in fact, never needed surgery. And the medical center where you were treated is ignoring the problem. Waking Up Blind is the story of how an eye surgeon became the cause of an array of medical problems for his patients. It is also the story of how one of the nation's premier medical centers tried to conceal the growing scandal. The faculty who exposed the problems were punished. Official committees and the university leaders minimized the misconduct. Slowly, lawsuits and publicity brought some to light in bits and pieces. With the use of court documents, transcripts of tape-recorded conversations, interviews, and personal observation, Dr. Tom Harbin presents this case from the very beginning, uncovering all levels of wrongdoing and secrecy. Waking Up Blind will shock the reader with its candid exploration of the dark side of medicine.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 Big ego and big health care December 14, 2009
Horace Nalle (Atlanta, GA USA)
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
As with any industry, there's a place in American health care where big money and big ego cross paths. But in medicine, that intersection is often found in the body and mind of individual Americans.
A distinguished ophthalmologist and clinical professor at Emory, Tom Harbin provides the authoritative account of the rise and rise of Dwight Cavanagh. Performing eye surgeries in impressive numbers, Cavanagh made himself into a money machine for Emory. Not only did the institution receive reimbursement for the procedures; Cavanagh was also adept at winning grants. The whole department prospered. The University built state-of-the art facilities. Everybody seemed to win. Cavanagh was the ophthalmological equivalent of a rock star.
Except that whispers began to spread about whether the patients really needed all those operations. In one case, Cavanagh operated on the wrong eye, blinding a poor man who hadn't clearly needed surgery in the first place. After too many operations on too many borderline patients, the hard-working, honest physicians alongside Cavanagh finally mustered the courage to question the rock star's practices. Cynically, the Emory administration closed ranks, and it was the honest critics whose careers were stunted.
Harbin tells this true story with a novelist's pace and an insider's authority. Waking Up Blind succeeds because it's a gripping story told by an authoritative physician with a graceful and unobtrusive style. It's also an engaging account of how Big Ego and Big Health Care can actually compromise patient outcomes. Arriving in the midst of the national health care debate, Waking Up Blind couldn't be more timely.
Hottest topic and book I've seen in healthcare in 20 years, living story, don't miss it! December 2, 2009
Robin Dubois (Behind you)
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book is a long awaited ring of truth calling to the hearts of those who were and are close to those involved. The story of institutional corruption is gripping but also sickening, this is not fiction and it is a living scandal that continues today and has many more victims than Dr. Harbin's book describes. Any interested reporter has but to place one call at random to any doctor's office in Atlanta to validate this story and numerous other allegations by respected professionals against Emory. Dr Harbin writes from all of our hearts and souls as Americans, read this book and cry out against the abuse of power and profit at the heart of our nations soul, among the very leaders of communities we look up to.
Robin du Bois
Timely, Interesting and "Capotesque" December 14, 2009
Thomas Beard (Atlanta, GA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Because of the current interest in healthcare by the President and Congress, Dr Harbin's book is important and timely. Because it is well-written and very interesting, the book is also entertaining. In my opinion, it's almost "Capotesque" in it's capacity to lead the reader through an unbelievable adventure which almost makes one feel that this factual disaster is actually a novel.
This will be my Christmas gift to my friends in the medical community as well as to those who enjoy a "page turner."
Well done !
Redemption Through Remembrance February 14, 2010
Ronald G. Boothe (Tacoma, WA USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Shortly before 6 pm on September 12, 1983, I found myself sitting in the surgery suite at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. What I did not know at the time, but learned later, was that a horrible mistake was about to happen right after I left. The next patient in line, an elderly African American man named Sargus Houston was scheduled to have surgery performed on his right eye, but the surgery was done on the left. That accident set in motion a chain of events that was to alter the lives of countless individuals, including my own, over the next several years. The facts are now spelled out publicly for the first time in Tom Harbin's book (Waking up Blind: Lawsuits Over Eye Surgery, Langdon Street Press, 2009). I was a direct witness to some of the happenings detailed in the book, but mostly what I knew about these events as they were playing out was revealed via the grapevine of whispers in the shadows of the hallways at Emory University. I was only a bystander, but not an emotionally neutral one; more akin to an eyewitness to a mugging.
A quarter of a century has passed since these events occurred, and I am now retired from Emory University. Over the years I heard rumors via the grapevine that numerous lawsuits pertaining to the events I had witnessed had been settled, and that Emory University had been forced to pay out millions of dollars to various injured parties. However, the results of these settled lawsuits were sealed, and I had resigned myself to accepting the reality that the details about what had happened, the good, the bad, and the ugly, would never see the light of day. I am gratified to see that Tom Harbin's book has now shined a spotlight on what was kept hidden for far too long. I have written a longer essay detailing my personal account of some of the happenings that are detailed in the book, and that is posted on my blogsight at [...]
My hope is that this book will start a dialog among my former colleagues at Emory University about what can be done now to right some of the wrongs of the past. Perhaps there can still be redemption through remembrance.
Pure Alchemy: Dusty Archives Spun into Gold January 13, 2010
Robert Chambers (Atlanta GA USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Ophthalmologists and local grandees behaving badly in Atlanta. Old letters. Depositions. Does this sound promising? Tom Harbin has transformed such potentially leaden non-fictional material into a narrative that is as difficult to put down as the best sort of Grishamite thriller. In fact, I didn't put the book down. I read it straight through, finishing at about 5 AM and paying dearly the next day. I confess to knowing a couple of the major participants, and I've had my own very unhappy collision with a branch of the Emory Clinic in Atlanta that seemed to be, like the Emory department that Dr. Harbin anatomizes, the medical equivalent of a puppy mill. My own contact with Emory medicine, though, was not a plus in terms of my wanting to read the book. Indeed, I had to overcome an aversion to revisiting this environment. I was able to do so because of this book's narrative power: a cumulative portrait of evil emerges along with that of the growing corruption of a scientific/academic institution that pulls all manner of political levers to cover up and protect that evil and to punish the courageous few who persist in pursuit of truth and common decency. Among the latter are two heroes whose careers are derailed, and the book is dedicated to them. A third hero is the narrator/implied author, Dr. Harbin. No doubt he is on dangerous legal ground making such revelations, but he seems to hold nothing back. I was initially inclined to say that his riveting prose, appropriately, is surgical, but it is more than that. Our Founding Fathers revered as their models the unpretentious courage, lucidity, and incorruptibility of the leaders of the ancient Roman republic. I am certain that these Romans as well as our Founders would recognize Dr. Harbin as a peer.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
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