Western medicine is dominated by a single imperative – the quest for machinelike perfection in the delivery of care.
It may seem harsh to say, but if it was a sixty-year-old man I would’ve taken the leg without question.” This was partly, I think, a purely emotional unwillingness to cut off the limb of a pretty twenty-three-year-old – the kind of sentimentalism that can get you in trouble.
After a while, though, it seemed that the only thing he thought about was getting through all his patients as quickly as possible.
Human beings have an ability to simply recognize the right thing to do sometimes. Judgment, Klein points out, is rarely a calculated weighing of all options, which we are not good at anyway, but instead an unconscious form of pattern recognition.
Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.
When things go wrong, it’s almost impossible for a physician to talk to a patient honestly about mistakes.
At most, a doctor might say, “I’m sorry that things didn’t go as well as we had hoped.
People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good.
Some I am fortunate to still keep up with. Others I was never given the chance to know as well as I wish I could have. All of them have taught me more than any could know.
The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The.
For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.
Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.
They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions.
And they missed out on treatments that they might have preferred.
So the night before the operation he did an unusual thing: he discussed the treatment options with her and let her choose.
Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.
Patients ask questions, look up information on the Internet, seek second opinions. And they decide.
But once he put his recommendations down on paper it was hard for hospitals and medical groups not to follow through and hold doctors to the plan.
It is a reality of medicine that choosing to not do something – to not order a test, to not give an antibiotic, to not take a patient to the operating room – is far harder than choosing to do it.
Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off – or even alive.
In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience.