So You Want to Be a Doctor

Misleadingly titled, this often snide memoir shares Zeman's idiosyncratic experiences more than it offers hard advice on a medical career. Now a Berkeley orthopedist, Zeman launches into recounting his childhood and college days without explaining the book's subject or gaining the reader's trust. Relentlessly cynical, he labels college professors ``academic freeloaders,'' lies on his medical school applications and considers medical textbooks an ``oversized bundle of bullshit.'' Physicians, as well as schools and institutions, are given juvenile pseudonyms. The book proceeds through the author's years in medical school, his orthopedic residency (he skips an internship), and stints assisting a sports doctor who patches up the local pro football team and manning a first-aid station at a ski resort. In his professional practice, Zeman takes on another football team, makes contacts on the golf course and gets rich by setting up his own physical therapy facility. He digs up some worthwhile dirt, revealing how a prominent doctor dispenses drugs to athletes and movie stars, how another billed patients for surgery he did not conduct and how an insurance plan delayed necessary surgery to save money. Mostly, though, this book suffers from a case of jaundice. (July)