Words matter. These are the best Atul Gawande Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They’ve lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.
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.
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn’t write, I don’t know if I would do surgery.
Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
The vast majority of doctors really do try to take the money out of their minds. But to provide the best possible care requires using resources in a way that keeps you viable but improves the quality of care.
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
The writing I love has something memorable in it – an image, a smell. It’s the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people – that’s writing.
There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen.
Most people are squeamish about saying how much they earn, but in medicine the situation seems especially fraught. Doctors aren’t supposed to be in it for the money, and the more concerned a doctor seems to be about making money the more suspicious people become about the care being provided.
Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.
I write because it’s my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don’t understand, and getting better at something.
I think we are faced in medicine with the reality that we have to be willing to talk about our failures and think hard about them, even despite the malpractice system. I mean, there are things that we can do to make that system better.
To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation – head down, trying not to screw up, trying to make it from one day to the next – that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and asking how much money you want to make.
Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people’s lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.
We now live in the era of the super-specialist – of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn’t.
Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt – the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.
People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor’s pen. It’s not that we make all the money. It’s that we order all the money.
I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock n’ roll – it has to be good rock n’ roll – and I still think it is true.
The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.
I’m floating between multiple media. I really wish you could buy the hardcover book and it would come with the digital download and audible version. I spend stupid amounts of money because I’m usually buying my books in at least two formats.
In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.
When I do an operation, it’s half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it’s like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
