Reaching Down The Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys Into The Human Brain

In this gripping book, Dr Allan Ropper takes the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound: A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time bomb, a salesman who drives around and around a roundabout unable to get off, a college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play, a child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive, a mother of two young girls diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth living. Ropper explores how to treat such cases, counsel affected individuals, and train future clinicians to handle the moral and medical aspects of brain disease.