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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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Atul Gawande
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: May 11
Journalist
Medical Writer
Professor
Researcher
Surgeon
Brooklyn
New York
Atul A Gawande
Atul Gawande
Percent
Goes
Three
Complications
Wells
Complication
Everything
Hospital
Come
Hospitals
Well
Majors
Time
Major

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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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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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Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
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We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
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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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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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Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
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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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Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
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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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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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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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We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
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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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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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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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