Uncaring

How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients

Contributors

By Robert Pearl, MD

Formats and Prices

Price

$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

With our health care system both dysfunctional and constantly changing, how can doctors actually keep us healthy and safe?

The spread of COVID-19 has brought the lives of doctors into sharper focus than ever before. We now see how the daily work of making important, even life-and-death decisions is frequently made harder. Hospitals and medical offices face budget problems, the influence of big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, as well as stress and long hours and massive amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork. And that was before the pandemic.

In this important book, Dr. Robert Pearl–the former CEO of Permanente and a Stanford professor–shows how all these stresses have led to a toxic culture in medicine. Doctors resist change, leading to important clerical mistakes. They don’t offer equal treatment to nonwhite patients. Their competitive work ethic leads to burnout and bad decisions. All these mistakes can be and frequently are matters of life and death.

As we engage in a public debate about the appropriate role of government, technology, big pharma and insurance companies in our health care, we’ve paid little attention to what it actually feels like to be a doctor. In our rush to express gratitude for “frontline” doctors, we are also neglecting their humanity, for better and worse. If we want to improve medical outcomes, for doctors and patients alike, we need to start seeing health care professionals as the real and flawed human beings they actually are. Uncaring is a breakthrough book that draws just such a portrait, and offers a prescription for a safer and healthier system.

Request Desk/Exam Copy

Genre:

On Sale
Dec 30, 2025
Page Count
400 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781541758285

Robert Pearl, MD

About the Author

Dr. Robert Pearl is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group. Named one of Modern Healthcare‘s 50 most influential physician leaders, Pearl is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on strategy and leadership, and lectures on information technology and health care policy. He is the author of the Washington Post bestseller Mistreated, hosts the popular podcast Fixing Healthcare, publishes a newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers, and is a regular contributor to Forbes. He has been featured on CBS This Morning, CNBC, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today and Bloomberg News, and is a frequent keynote speaker at healthcare and medical technology conferences.

Learn more about this author