Signals by Saira Hameed: Hooray for hormones
Saira Hameed’s book 'Signals' provides a clinical and pedagogical overview of endocrinology, exploring how hormones function as critical signals within the human body. The book uses patient vignettes to explain common and rare conditions while critiquing the medical industry's approach to patient care.
Why it matters
It offers a humanistic perspective on medical practice, emphasizing the importance of listening to patient narratives in complex diagnostic processes.
Chemistry is what we are, a fact underlined by our endocrinology: our hormones. Hormones act as keys or switches or signals in the body, with Signals being the apposite title of Saira Hameed’s excellent overview of disordered functionality in our normally fine-tuned internal milieux.
Hameed immediately argues that endocrinology is a “whole body – whole mind – whole person speciality”. Diagnosis sometimes requires the detective skills of a persistent Columbo type.
She highlights the often-tortuous narratives and plot lines of an endocrine patient ’s history-telling, the hunt for a key reveal, the demand that the doctor listen carefully, undertake a close reading of the story.
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