Books

Being a family doctor isn’t easy. Why? Because you’re either an employed physician or a doctor trying to survive on your own. Both are making doctors quit their profession every day. You have heard about direct primary care as an option, but you have been bombarded with misleading advertising, confusing recommendations, and bad information from those who fear taking the leap. This makes you question yourself every day. Do you really want to become a DPC doctor? If you do, how do you go about doing it? You start by reading The Official Guide to Starting Your Direct Primary Care Practice. In this fact-filled book, you’ll discover how to avoid the common pitfalls, the top tips to market your practice, how to make patient experiences great and much more.

THE NUMBER ONE BOOK SOLD FOR DIRECT PRIMARY CARE!!!

As a Direct Primary Care doctor, you have a big hill to climb. The job is not easy. It’s an uncertain world that can be as scary as it is gratifying. The Direct Primary Care Doctor’s Daily Motivational Journal helps you in this endeavor by using the old-fashioned, pen-and-paper method allowing you to brainstorm, concentrate and gather your thoughts. Just fifteen minutes each morning with DPC specific questions will help you be the doctor you always wanted to be, in the practice you always wanted to have. But there’s a secret: you can’t be told what to think or believe. You must work through the process and find the answers yourself. That is what this book is for.

This Direct Primary Care Doctors’ Daily Motivational Journal is NOT just for beginners. It works really well even for seasoned DPC Docs who continually need to refresh their spirits, keep sharp and stay motivated. Whether you are just starting out or you are in year 10, this workbook is well worth your time and effort.

Some of the things you will learn by reading Slowing the Churn in Direct Primary Care (While Also Keeping Your Sanity):

  • How and why to analyze why patients are churning through your practice
  • Why some patients are not for you
  • Why hedonistic adaptation is affecting your practice
  • The traps of email and texting
  • How to create a community around your practice
  • The four agreements of DPC
  • You are not an imposter

“In his follow-up to The Official Guide to Starting Your Own Direct Primary Care Practice and The Direct Primary Care Doctor’s Daily Motivational Journal, Dr. Doug Farrago offers insight into the churn of DPC, along with recommendations for slowing it and when and why it’s sometimes actually a good thing.  This is a valuable read for all DPC and DPC-curious physicians, but an especially helpful read for those who have opened DPC practices and find it’s time to take an honest look at how they are doing as physicians and business owners.  With characteristic brutal honesty, wit, and self-deprecating critique of his own experiences, there’s something important in it for everyone to learn. 

Christine Degnon, MD, MPH, Coastal Direct Primary Care, Lewes, DE

By the year 2000, pharmaceutical companies were spending more than $15 billion dollars a year on promoting prescription drugs in the United States. It was not uncommon to see doctors going to extravagant dinners, amusement parks, and golfing events, all sponsored by these companies and all orchestrated by what are called drug reps.

In 2002, I first pieced together a fictionalized, diary-like version of this tale, which spread virally on the Internet and became an instant hit, especially with drug reps. Initially called Diary of a Pharmaceutical Representative (Drug Rep), it was reproduced first in my humorous medical magazine called the Placebo Journal and then in his book The Placebo Chronicles. It even inspired a 2005 NY Times article called “Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales”. In Diary of a Drug Rep, I expanded this initial vignette, giving the reader a unique look into how drug reps lived, worked and “sold” their products in their heyday. The intent of this book is not to belittle this profession, but rather to understand it and, ok yes, laugh at it a little. Diary of a Drug Rep will give readers insight into a very peculiar profession that affects us all more than we even know.

“I loved this book. The best way to process some of the crazy things that happened, and continue to happen, in healthcare is to laugh — otherwise we just might have to cry. Diary of a Drug Rep had me howling at times and thinking “that’s funny cuz it’s true,” and you just may learn some truths about life and business too.”

ZDoggMD (Zubin Damania MD), doctor, internet sensation, writer, medical parody singer

True Tales of the ridiculous, the silly, and the just plain weird cases doctors face—lampooning the medical bureaucracy that makes practicing medicine and getting medical care such a headache.

Doctors have a sick sense of humor. This is the deep, dark, and hilarious secret of the medical profession revealed by the irreverent Dr. Douglas Farrago in his popular satirical magazine, Placebo Journal—affectionately known by its thousands of fanatic readers as “Mad magazine for doctors” and called, by U.S. News.com, “raunchy, adolescent, and very funny.” Now, in The Placebo Chronicles, Dr. Farrago has compiled the best of the most outrageous and uproarious true stories to come out of the ERs and examination rooms of doctors all over the country.

Submitted by actual physicians, these are the stories they tell each other at cocktail parties and in doctors’ lounges, trading sidesplitting and truly unusual tales of their most embarrassing medical moments, the grossest things they’ve ever seen in medicine, their favorite Munchausen patients, and much more, including “The X-Ray Files”—mind-boggling anecdotes and images of the oddest foreign objects doctors have removed from patients. Not for the faint of heart, the humor in The Placebo Chronicles is brutally funny—just what the doctor ordered to guard against the ill effects of an M.D.’s worst enemies: the Medical Axis of Evil, a.k.a. drug companies, HMOs, and malpractice insurers.

Fully illustrated with fake advertisements—for pseudopharmaceuticals like OxyCotton Candy and Indifferex (the mediocre antidepressant)—this refreshingly honest collection invites doctors and patients alike to share the laughter, a liberal dose of the very best medicine.