Convictions tells the story of what's really going on in healthcare behind the scenes--money, greed, corruption, but also suffering, heroism, and grace. We meet the pseudonymous Dr. Greene and Dr. O’Neil and see what happens to doctors when their hospitals are sold to private equity; patient Katie Mahr, and see what happens to patients when profit not proper care is the main focus of your insurance company, and gangster Frankie Tavola, whose dying in the end provides the key, literally, to the one big change that needs to be made to make our healthcare the medicine we deserve.

Based on interviews, legal cases, and patient stories, Convictions includes detailed notes so the reader can know that its stories are mainly true, even the most unbelievable events, from the healthcare executives' secret meeting in Barcelona to fund a computerized billing program that steals from doctors, to the gangsters' organizing during Superbowl to buy, close and then sell hospitals for their valuable real estate, to the judges who nullify jury verdicts for political gain, to the delayed treatment of patients and the harassment of doctors who push back.

Fast-paced and topical but also deep and universal, the ultimate moral of Convictions is that healthcare concerns everyone because all of us will eventually be patients.

Dr. Sweet is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in history. She practiced medicine for over twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing. Her first book was God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Riverhead, 2012), where she laid out her evidence—in stories of her patients and her hospital—for some radically new ideas about medicine and healthcare in this country. It was a best-seller with 96.000 copies sold and won numerous awards, including being a finalist for the PEN.

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014) for her second book, Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, (Riverhead, 2017), in which she expanded and built on those ideas and stories. In our attempts to get control of healthcare costs by privileging “efficiency,” she suggested, we’ve been headed down the wrong path. Medicine works best—that is, arrives at the right diagnosis and the right treatment for the least amount of money—when it is personal and face-to-face; when the doctor has enough time to do a good job, and pays attention not only to the patient but to what’s around the patient. She called this approach Slow Medicine, and believed that put into wider practice, it would not only be more satisfying for patient and doctor but also less expensive. This book has sold 109.000 copies.

Her works are translated into German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Hungarian, and Romanian. The New York Times has called her ideas “hard-core subversion." Vanity Fair judged God’s Hotel to be a “radical and compassionate alternative to modern healthcare,” and Health Affairs has described Dr. Sweet as a “visionary” and “subversive in all the best ways.”