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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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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Together
Drugs
Best
Obsessed
Enough
Medicine
Great
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Specialists
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Technologies
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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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Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
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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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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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People who reach certain levels of frailty, more important than getting their mammogram, more important than getting their blood pressure tweaked, they're at high risk of falling. If they fall and break their hip, they not only die sooner, they die miserably.
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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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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.
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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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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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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
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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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Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
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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.
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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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