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
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.
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.
The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.
Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.
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.
Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.