Quotes from Atul Gawande

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist.

The question was how to buy the child time to find out. It wasn't clear he'd last the night.

Research has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels.

Given the hours and the extremely limited exposure, being an overnight anchor is a job without great appeal.

She felt her sanity slipping. She wanted to be a good daughter. She wanted her father to be safe, and she wanted him to be happy. But she wanted a manageable life, too.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

fewer than 2 percent of the patients who had received substandard care ever filed suit. Conversely, only a small minority among the patients who did sue had in fact been the victims of negligent care.

perfect their skills, and move on to a better position.

It seemed as if, once aging led to debility, it was impossible for anyone to be happy. *

There's no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win.

No one was thinking of any better options

And a patient's likelihood of winning a suit depended primarily on how poor his or her outcome was, regardless of whether that outcome was caused by disease or unavoidable risks of care.

it's the meaning behind the information that people are looking for more than the facts. The best way to convey meaning is to tell people what the information means to you yourself, he said. And he gave me three words to use to do that.

and loss of focus.

As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

Wisdom is prudent strength.

I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it's not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.

the greater blood flow to the face drained blood from the brain.)

terrible. But as it turned out, we'd done more good than we could have hoped for.

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

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

When I saw him three months later [after the death of his wife], he was still despondent. 'I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered,' he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes rimmed red.