Atul Gawande famous quotes

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

Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.
-- Atul Gawande

#Writing #Thinking #Trying

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.
-- Atul Gawande

#Practice #One Day #Way

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.
-- Atul Gawande

#Accomplishment #Expectations #People

Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
-- Atul Gawande

#Men

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.
-- Atul Gawande

#Opportunity #Medicine #Facts

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.
-- Atul Gawande

#Kind #Surgery #Wanted

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.
-- Atul Gawande

#Running #Organization #Vaccines

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
-- Atul Gawande

#Coaching #Done #May

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
-- Atul Gawande

#Want #Wells

A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
-- Atul Gawande

#Differences #Risk #Steps

Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.
-- Atul Gawande

#Motivation #Inspiration #Our Generation

No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
-- Atul Gawande

#Country #Ebola #Numbers

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
-- Atul Gawande

#Teamwork #Motivation #Inspiration

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?
-- Atul Gawande

#Understanding #Alternatives #World

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
-- Atul Gawande

#School #Medical #Mortality

And in stories, endings matter.
-- Atul Gawande

#Stories #Matter

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

#Team #Doctors #Practice

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life,
-- Atul Gawande

#Integrity #Battle

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

#Symphony #People #Half

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
-- Atul Gawande

#Medicine #Modern Medicine #Modern