The anthropologist Lawrence Cohen describes conferences and conventions not so much as scholarly goings-on but as carnivals – “colossal events where academic proceedings are overshadowed by professional politics, ritual enactments of disciplinary boundaries, sexual liminality, tourism and trade, personal and national rivalries, the care and feeding of professional kinship, and the sheer enormity of discourse.

— 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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