When a Doctor Gets It Wrong, Who Gets to Judge? Doctors Are Not Murderers by Debraj Shome & Aarti Heda — Read & Reviewed by Sameer Gudhate

There is a strange contradiction in the way we look at doctors.

When a doctor saves a life, we call it a miracle.

When treatment fails, we sometimes call it negligence.

Somewhere between those two extremes, we forget something rather obvious.

The person standing in the white coat is a human being.

Doctors Are Not Murderers by Dr. Debraj Shome and Dr. Aarti Heda comes from that uncomfortable space between medical responsibility and public judgment. It is a collection of real-life stories from the world of medicine, but I don't think the book is really asking us to simply defend doctors.

It is asking us to reconsider how quickly we judge them.

And that is a much more difficult conversation.

The title itself is deliberately provocative. It almost sounds like an argument waiting to happen. But as I moved through the stories, I realised that the authors aren't claiming that doctors are always right. They aren't asking patients to ignore genuine medical mistakes, incompetence or accountability.

Their larger argument is more nuanced: a bad outcome does not automatically mean a bad doctor.

That distinction sounds simple.

In practice, it isn't.

The book takes us through 23 real-life narratives involving cancer, trauma, skin grafting, dementia, dermatology, gynaecology, mental health and other areas of medical practice. What makes these stories work is that the medicine is rarely presented as the whole story.

Behind every diagnosis is a person.

Behind every treatment decision is uncertainty.

Behind every unsuccessful outcome is often a doctor who has to go home carrying a question that the patient's family may never see.

Could I have done something differently?

That is the part of medicine patients rarely witness.

We see the prescription.

We see the bill.

We see the procedure.

We see the outcome.

We don't necessarily see the sleepless night before a difficult decision, the conversation with a frightened family, the emotional exhaustion after losing a patient, or the professional responsibility of making a choice when none of the available choices is particularly good.

The authors bring those invisible moments into the foreground.

And I think that is where the book is strongest.

One of the things I appreciated is that it doesn't try to make doctors superhuman. In fact, doing so would weaken its own argument. If doctors are portrayed as flawless angels, then the moment something goes wrong, the entire image collapses.

The book instead asks us to accept something much harder:

Doctors can be compassionate and still make mistakes.They can be brilliant and still lose patients.They can make the correct decision and still produce an outcome nobody wanted.

Medicine doesn't always offer a happy ending simply because the doctor did everything possible.

That reality is uncomfortable for patients because illness is frightening. When someone we love is sick, we desperately want someone to be in control.

The doctor becomes that person.

Perhaps that is where some of our unrealistic expectations begin.

We want doctors to be scientists, counsellors, miracle workers, emotional anchors and, sometimes, people who can reverse the consequences of disease.

But they cannot always do that.

And when reality refuses to cooperate, anger needs somewhere to go.

The book also made me think about the opposite extreme.

It is easy to read Doctors Are Not Murderers as an argument against blaming doctors. But I don't think blind trust is the answer either.

Doctors must be accountable.

Patients have the right to ask questions.

Medical errors should be examined.

Negligence should not be excused simply because medicine is difficult.

And patients who have suffered deserve to be heard.

That is where I think the conversation becomes more meaningful.

Trust should not mean unquestioning faith. Accountability should not mean automatic suspicion.

The difficult task is finding the space between the two.

The authors are at their best when they show that space through individual stories rather than turning the book into a lecture. The medical cases become windows into larger questions about dignity, fear, responsibility and the fragile relationship between a patient and the person treating them.

The writing is accessible too. You don't need a medical background to understand what is happening, and the medical details generally serve the human story rather than overwhelm it.

There were moments when I wanted more context around some cases, particularly around the wider circumstances and perspectives of the families involved. Since the book is so strongly invested in rebuilding trust, allowing even more room for the patient's side of certain conflicts could have made that conversation richer.

But that reservation doesn't take away from what the book achieves.

What stayed with me most was not the argument that doctors are good.

It was the reminder that doctors are human.

That distinction matters.

We have created a strange culture around medicine where we sometimes put doctors on pedestals and then become furious when they behave like human beings. We want them to possess extraordinary knowledge but ordinary human vulnerability is somehow unacceptable.

Perhaps we need to change that expectation.

Perhaps the better relationship is one in which the doctor doesn't have to pretend to be God and the patient doesn't have to assume the doctor is the enemy.

Reading this book, I kept returning to one uncomfortable question:

When medicine cannot guarantee an outcome, what exactly should we expect a doctor to guarantee?

Effort?

Honesty?

Competence?

Communication?

Accountability?

Or simply the promise that they will do everything reasonably possible?

I don't think Doctors Are Not Murderers provides a complete answer.

And perhaps it shouldn't.

What it does is make the question harder to ignore.

For me, that is the book's real value.

It doesn't ask us to stop questioning doctors.

It asks us to question how we question them.

And perhaps, before judging the person behind the white coat, we should remember that the enemy in the hospital is usually not the doctor.

It is the disease.

Read this book if you want to understand the doctor-patient relationship from the other side of the consultation table. Read it especially if you have ever wondered what happens inside a doctor's mind when the outcome isn't what anyone hoped for.

Because sometimes the most important thing a book can do is not make us take someone's side.

It can make us understand why there are two sides in the first place.

Doctors are not gods.They are not villains.They are people making difficult decisions in a profession where even the right decision can sometimes end in heartbreak.

And that may be the hardest truth of medicine to accept.

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