Physicians’ Untold Stories: Miraculous Experiences

Excellent book, it opened my eyes to the fact that there is so much as human beings we just dont know.Thoroughly good read

Doctors stories are about 3-5 pages. Stories are true based on the author’s statement. No need to understand heavy medical terminology. Stories are both happy and sad, enjoyable all the same.

Inspiring and Informative.

Enjoyed reading this.

I like to read books that help raise my spirits, entertain me, help me improve my health, and impart the kind of pearls of wisdom that enhance my life. Physicians Untold Stories, by Scott J. Kolbaba, fills that bill.

Although the book uses the word miraculous—and some of the stories of recovery sure defy rational explanations—there’s also a practical side to this book. As I was reading I decided that I should know more about CPR than I do. Then I learned symptoms of stroke and heart attack and became more understanding of depression and blood clots. This was all through the storytelling that was memorialized by Dr. Kolbaba’s well-documented interviews with the physicians’ whose first-hand stories he related. It is a book of stories—spellbinding ones.

I learned about palliative care (physicians specializing in treating patients with serious or terminal illnesses) and, the importance of helping seriously ill patients achieve their goals in life.

The stories also enlightened me about just how frenetic the life of many of these doctors are—starting work at 5:30 a.m. with rounds at hospitals and then ending with phone calls far into the night and on weekends. After reading the book I also created checklist of things to see my doctor about.

One of the most incredible stories was relayed by a physician who’s physician colleague had suffered a massive stroke and was in a deep coma. Even though they planned to pull the plug in three days, this physician/friend sat side at the hospital bed telling him fishing stories that he had never heard before. Because there was zero response, he doubted that what he was saying was even being heard. They had never fished together so the stories were all new ones to the doctor in the coma.

On the day that they were going terminate life support on the unconscious doctor that doctor suddenly popped up out of that deep coma and acted like his normal self. He then thanked his colleague doctor for telling him all the amusing fishing stories, and repeated them in great detail. A week later he was back at work.

The book is inspirational as well as educational. Well written, succinct, informational, and, although factual, presents medical stories that at times defied any medical explanation to the patients’ recoveries. Thank you Scott for telling these Untold Stories. You did a an impressive job doing it.

A book to keep you engrossed and feeds your soul at the same time.

This book is a collection of stories from 27 different physicians who relate their experiences which suggest that a greater power is at work. To be frank, most of the related experiences are nothing more than what perhaps many of us (including myself) have experienced – i.e., a chain of explained events (call them “coincidences” if you like) that resulted in a beneficial outcome. Perhaps the only true miracle event related in this book is the cure of Barabra Synder from multiple sclerosis (Ch. 22), which is verified by other sources (a Google search can easily verify this miraculous story). The author also relates credible stories showing the potential power of prayer (Chs. 22 and 25 in particular).

It is likely that physicians have more of these interesting experiences than the rest of us due to their profession (i.e., dealing with life-and-death matters on a daily basis), or possibly due to their motivations for becoming physicians (i.e., a deep desire to help people).

Are these tales the result of divine intervention, divine inspiration, and/or just events which cannot be explained by modern science? Who can tell?

I think the big picture presented by this book is that is “miracles” can happen to all of us, and quite often – be it something telling us to change our travel plans for some odd reason (Ch. 24), or merely being in the right place at the right time (many different chapters). At the very least this book should give the reader pause to consider the possibility that miracles can happen to us every day, but that we are typically oblivious to them. For example, I rant about the moron driver in front of me who cruises through the stale yellow light at 10 mph below the speed limit, thus leaving me stranded at a red light, but perhaps this was God saving me from another moron who later ran a red light and who would have hit me but for the fact that I was sitting safely at a red light up the road. In order for us to believe that miracles do occur (due to divine intervention) they don’t always need to be something as fantastic as an inexplicable cure from MS – sometimes they can be as simple as missing a freeway exit (Ch. 14), or catching a red light. Of course, for every “saving-red-light” there is equally the possibility of a “dooming-green-light” – we simply have no way of knowing when (or why) God will intervene in our lives.

Perhaps the best reason to read this book is that it provides the reader with food for thought regarding the existence of God, and the possibility of His intervention in the events of our lives (for reasons beyond our understanding).

My reason for rating this book as only 4 stars is that most of the stories tend to the mundane, with only a few standing out as truly extraordinary.