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Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

Atul Gawande

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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Medicine
Modern
Mantra
Mantras
Expertise

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We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.
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I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
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This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.
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You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.
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No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
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Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
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As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
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Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
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If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me.
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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
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When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.
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I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.
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One of the consequences of if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is that all of us now are at risk of being a preexisting - of having a preexisting condition waiting to happen. Life, increasingly, is a preexisting condition waiting to happen, now that we have more and more of this data available.
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You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.
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Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
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Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.
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We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
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Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
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Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.
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