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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
Mistake
Make
Villains
Villain
Doctors
Mistakes

More quotes by Atul Gawande

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Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
Atul Gawande
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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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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.
Atul Gawande
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Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
Atul Gawande
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What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande