Playing God: The Evolution of a Modern Surgeon

What does it mean to be a doctor?

“I am a doctor.”

Every year, thousands of medical school graduates utter these four simple words. But as you will see in Playing God, earning an M.D. is just the first step to becoming a real physician.

In this page-turning, thrilling, and moving memoir, Dr. Anthony Youn reveals that the true metamorphosis from student to doctor occurs not in medical school but in the formative years of residency training and early practice. It is only through actually saving and losing patients, taking on the medical establishment, wrestling with financial and emotional survival, and fighting for patients’ lives that a young doctor becomes a mature and competent physician.

Dr. Youn takes you from the operating rooms of a university surgery residency program to the gleaming offices of top Beverly Hills plastic surgeons to opening the doors of his empty clinic as a new doctor with no money, no patients, and mountains of debt. Playing God leaves you with an unexpected answer to that profound question: “What does it mean to be a doctor?” 

In Playing God, you will take a journey through the world of surgery, hospitals, and the practice of medicine unlike any that you have traveled before.