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
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.
These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives.
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.
Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.
The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life,
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.
And in stories, endings matter.
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.