Atul Gawande Quotes
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
Quotes to Explore
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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.
Atul Gawande
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The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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 don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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
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Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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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
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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.
Atul Gawande
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Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.
Atul Gawande
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The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.
Atul Gawande
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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.
Atul Gawande
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As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
Atul Gawande
