You have a cough that won’t go away – and then? It’s not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he’s still trying to learn.

— Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande Quotes

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.

— Atul Gawande

After a while, though, it seemed that the only thing he thought about was getting through all his patients as quickly as possible.

— Atul Gawande

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.

— Atul Gawande

Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.

— Atul Gawande

When things go wrong, it’s almost impossible for a physician to talk to a patient honestly about mistakes.

— Atul Gawande

At most, a doctor might say, “I’m sorry that things didn’t go as well as we had hoped.

— Atul Gawande

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good.

— Atul Gawande

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.

— Atul Gawande

The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The.

— Atul Gawande

For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.

— Atul Gawande

Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.

— Atul Gawande

They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions.

— Atul Gawande

And they missed out on treatments that they might have preferred.

— Atul Gawande

So the night before the operation he did an unusual thing: he discussed the treatment options with her and let her choose.

— Atul Gawande

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

— Atul Gawande

Patients ask questions, look up information on the Internet, seek second opinions. And they decide.

— Atul Gawande

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.

— Atul Gawande

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.

— Atul Gawande

Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off – or even alive.

— Atul Gawande

In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience.

— Atul Gawande
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