First, Do No Harm

If you believe that television, movies or medical fiction, accurately portray what it’s like to be an acute care physician or a critically ill patient in a hospital today, think again.

Doctor Joseph Polk is an intelligent, charismatic, and a powerful member of the medical staff at Brier Hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he’s killing his patients. No gun, knife, poison or drug injected into their intravenous tubing, common plot lines in medical thrillers, and he doesn’t plan to kill them. They die anyway because this once brilliant physician, a functional psychopath for most of his career, has decompensated.

Nurses and front-line physicians see Polk’s indifference, incompetence, and stubborn cruelty, but the medical staff and the hospital administration are willfully blind. Patients suffer, and worse.

Jack Byrnes, finally completing his training in Intensive Care Medicine, joins the staff at Brier Hospital. Well prepared to care for patients, Jack is woefully unprepared when he runs smack into Joe Polk, the medical staff and the hospital’s administration.

The strength of First, Do No Harm lies in the authenticity of the medical setting and the struggles of patients and physicians. Joe Polk is a very different kind of villain.