Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande
Atul Gawandeis an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth5 November 1965
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.
When we lived in a society where we had large families that lived together, especially in agricultural societies like my grandfather and father grew up in, the result is you always had family around to take care of you.
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.
Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.
Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
And in stories, endings matter.
What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?
What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.
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.