The struggle in medicine isn’t with ignorance—it’s with complexity. And there’s no end in sight to that.Atul Gawande
In medicine, we are used to confronting failure; all doctors have unforeseen deaths and complications.Atul Gawande
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.Atul Gawande
We are loathe to mess with a success. Teaching hospitals resist innovating for fear of breaking systems that work in so many other respects very well.Atul Gawande
Surgery is at once brutish and delicate.Atul Gawande
Sometimes mystery is simply a fill-in for missing information, sometimes it is something we cannot know, and sometimes it is a crucial part of human experience.Atul Gawande
Training in surgery is like a metamorphosis from lay person to doctor, you are taught a completely new way to think about everyday problems, cooking dinner even.Atul Gawande
This is true not only of medicine, but of many professions: one starts with a dogmatic notion of rules and technical details, and learns with experience when to deviate.Atul Gawande
Good doctors exist not despite controversy, but because of it. In the practice of medicine, skeptical discontent is a virtue.Atul Gawande
You have to ask the right question to get meaningful numbers out of medicine. The question in medicine often isn’t whether something is significant but whether it is important.Atul Gawande