Quotes from Atul Gawande

I gave S. a "Do you want to take over?" look.

Yet given how much surgery is now done—Americans today undergo an average of seven operations in their lifetime, with surgeons performing more than fifty million operations annually—the amount of harm remains substantial. We continue to have upwards of 150,000 deaths following surgery every year

no matter how hard I tried, I was almost certain to make this error at least once in the course of my career.

The hardest substance in the human body is the white enamel of the teeth

operation I believe that with enough will and effort I can beat the odds.

Far more studies failed to find any lunar correlation with suicide.

Hair grows gray, for instance, simply because we run out of the pigment cells that give hair its color.

Yet although the odds were against me, it wasn't as if I had no chance of succeeding.

The cops then arrived and he fled in his car, leading them on a chase that ended in the massive crash.

I still have no idea what I did differently that day.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What

The rest of the night went no better.

the studies show no connection.

The companies' most effective tactic, however, was simply to put out the goods and let surgeons play.

the individualized, intuitive approach that lies at the center of modern medicine is flawed—it causes more mistakes than it prevents.

It had never occurred to me that I could go.

before I could get the words out of my mouth.

neither flushed nor pale.

and I vaguely remembered, from the occasions in my childhood when they had brought me along, how dense and enormous and exciting they seemed.

That's how a doctor earns money, she told me. It's a war with insurance, every step of the way.

and she asks if either might have anything to do with this.

A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don't start in independent practice until your midthirties. We

the studies show that you're better off sticking with the computer's judgment.

Their study found that the number of prescriptions required per resident fell to half that of the control nursing home. Psychotropic drugs for agitation, like Haldol, decreased in particular. The total drug costs fell to just 38 percent of the comparison facility. Deaths fell 15 percent.