Hippocrates cautioned that "The sick must battle both their illness and their doctors." It's especially true today, with medicine emerging as an incomprehensible series of specialists and doctors, options and opinions, experimental drugs and high-tech medical equipment. To help them through this maze, about 150 patients a day seek an unbiased second opinion from an unusual rabbi, self-educated in medicine. He can change the way his patients are treated with a single phone call, often to world-renowned experts in their fields. Rabbi Elimelech Firer, a 54-year-old Orthodox Jew, has been advising in medicine for the past 30 years on a voluntary basis. With dogged determination, up to date knowledge and unique diagnostic abilities, he challenges doctors to think again and again about the well-being of the patient. Is he really an emissary of good will and disinterested kindness, or does he wield too much influence that spawns dangerous preferences within the medical system? This is a story about a need in modern day medicine, and an exceptional Rabbi who employs religious values and the power of knowledge against the mighty medical establishment. Admired by some doctors and criticized by others, he remains a fascinating and unusual phenomenon in the world of medicine.
Hippocrates cautioned that "The sick must battle both their illness and their doctors." It's especially true today, with medicine emerging as an incomprehensible series of specialists and doctors, options and opinions, experimental drugs and high-tech medical equipment. To help them through this maze, about 150 patients a day seek an unbiased second opinion from an unusual rabbi, self-educated in medicine. He can change the way his patients are treated with a single phone call, often to world-renowned experts in their fields. Rabbi Elimelech Firer, a 54-year-old Orthodox Jew, has been advising in medicine for the past 30 years on a...