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Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

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
Villain
Doctors
Mistakes
Mistake
Make
Villains

More quotes by Atul Gawande

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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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Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
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This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
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Culture matters. Of course, if physicians are rewarded or penalized for their service and results, the culture will change. But the key values we doctors are being pressed to embrace are humility, teamwork, and discipline.
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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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I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
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What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
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A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
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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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Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
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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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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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We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
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We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
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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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The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.
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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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You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they dont have the physical skills but because they dont have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
Atul Gawande