Atul Gawande Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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.”
-- Atul Gawande

#School #Thinking #Medical

“Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.”
-- Atul Gawande

#People #Dying #Comfort

“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Pain #Medicine #Intuition

“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

#Technology #Thinking #Medicine

“At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Caring #Medicine #Differences

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Trying #Doe #Genius

“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

#Simple #Small Steps #Pitching

“We recruit for attitude and train for skill,”
-- Atul Gawande

#Attitude #Skills #Recruit

“You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Team #Recipes #Unexpected

“Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Acceptance #Arriving #Epiphany

“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

#Guilt #Done #Shame

“We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Winning #Dollars #Tickets

“No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Taken #Doctors #Perfection

“What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Nice #Skills #Discipline

“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

#Three #Wells #Complication

“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

#Writing #Thinking #Degrees

“This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Reality #Care #Harm

“Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Choices #Life Is #Relentless

“You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Mean #May #Circumstances

“In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Meaningful #Pain #Sleep

“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

#Team #Thinking #Medicine

“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.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Outsiders #Firsts #Poor

“Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Prudent #Faces

“In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Reform #Stories #Movement

“Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Sacrifice #Risk #Suffering

“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

#Fire #Skills #People

“We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Talking #People #Way

“Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Mistake #Doctors #Villain

“We Have Medicalized Aging, and That Experiment Is Failing Us”
-- Atul Gawande

#Aging #Failing #Experiments

“Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”
-- Atul Gawande

#Hands #Missing #Trying