The Liver Doctor: Finding humanism and empathy beyond social media battles

The Liver Doctor: Stories of Love, Loss and Regeneration

by Dr Cyriac Abby Philips

Published by Harper Collins India

299 pages ₹499

 

“Clinical medicine is not a practice, but an art; not a job, but curiosity, and there’s never a dull moment if patients are a physician’s true concern,” writes hepatologist Cyriac Abby Philips, better known as “The Liver Doc”, in 

his new memoir. 

With hundreds of thousands of followers online, the Kochi-based Dr Philips has become a vociferous advocate of evidence-based medicine over the last few years. Equally outspoken about the dangers of alternative treatments that lack rigorous clinical testing, he is both widely admired and controversial. He is also part of a growing cohort of doctors fighting the good fight — not just in the operating room, but also online, where conversations around health increasingly take centre stage and misinformation is rife. 

His social media handle, @theliverdoc, is a frequent site of heated debate, particularly over his critique of Ayurveda, which he describes as a pseudoscience, arguing that its practitioners and the herbal concoctions they prescribe often worsen or complicate health problems rather than solve them. It’s earned him a flurry of legal notices and labels. He has been trolled, called a “Christian missionary” and “big Pharma endorser”, but Dr Philips says his mission is to change public perception on long-standing medical myths known to cause harm. 

Those expecting controversy to dominate his new memoir, The Liver Doctor, may be surprised. He steps away from the hullabaloo of his online exposés to write an anecdotal, philosophical and intimate book about “love, loss and regeneration.” It is a scrupulous account of working with the sickest patients suffering from severe liver conditions, on the brink of death. It is his tribute to the essential qualities of medical care becoming rare today, he writes: “humanism, evidence-based practice and empathy”. 

The book reveals that Dr Philips did not set out to become a doctor at all. He turned to medicine because he wasn’t good at math. But there was always a storyteller in him, and this book brings the two worlds — writing and medicine — together to make a poignant and reflective memoir. 

In The Liver Doctor, the hero is not the doctor, but the liver itself: One of the least understood yet endlessly fascinating organs in the human body, and the only one capable of regenerating itself. The book unpacks the complex interplay between liver injury, liver failure and liver regeneration. 

Each chapter focuses on a different liver condition faced by his patients, and the challenges of diagnosing and treating them. These are interwoven with historical accounts and mythological references, offering a broader framing of how the liver has been understood over centuries and in clinical practice today. One tale of the liver’s supernatural vitality in mythology tells of how, every morning, Zeus would send the Aetos Kaukasios, the Caucasian Eagle, to feast on Prometheus’s liver, only for it to regenerate by the next day, and for the ordeal to begin all over again. 

The case files of the critically-ill patients he details in the book are educative and moving. What stands out is the empathy with which he manages patients and their families, going deep into their histories to investigate what might have caused the condition when initial testing reveals nothing. Some don’t make it, others recover. Many are unable to afford the liver transplant they desperately require. Some of these liver conditions, he writes, stem from consuming alternative herbal supplements, others from alcohol abuse, and still others have more mysterious causes. Not a drop of alcohol is safe, he emphasises, calling it “a socially accepted poison”. In many ways, this book is an attempt to prevent preventable deaths. 

He writes, for instance, of a husband who arrived at his clinic with his ailing wife and young children. At first, there was no obvious reason for her liver failure. A biopsy and more persistent questioning revealed how a nutritional supplement she was taking to lose weight caused severe liver damage. A detailed paper that Dr Philips and his co-authors published in a medical journal about her fatal liver toxicity was subsequently removed, citing “legal reasons” and threats from the supplement manufacturer. In another chapter, he writes about the case of a father and son, the latter battling alcohol-addiction and a failing liver. With meticulous care, he recovered, stayed sober, until a life-changing event pulled him back into the disease.  

Dr Philips doesn’t judge his patients. He instead turns the questions inward, asking how much medicine can truly promise to heal, how a doctor makes impossible decisions when death is near, and how we can live better lives. He urges: Make good memories while you are living.

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The reviewer is an author and journalist covering public health, development policy and culture