Quotes from Atul Gawande

The alternative was to do nothing.

He described the bad lighting and her extremely thick neck, and was careful to make those sound not like excuses but merely like complicating factors.

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

But it was his best chance of dying peacefully, in his own bed, and being able to say good-bye to his loved ones.

Surgeons are so absurdly ultraspecialized that when we joke about right ear surgeons and left ear surgeons, we have to check to be sure they don't exist

I sank into my seat, my face hot.

such episodes are shrugged off.

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

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness

the builders trusted in the power of communication. They didn't believe in the wisdom of the single individual, of even an experienced engineer. They believed in the wisdom of the group, the wisdom of making sure that multiple pairs of eyes were on a problem and then letting the watchers decide what to do. Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.

Some attendings shook their heads in sympathy.

He's a fine doctor," people will say, "but sometimes he has his moments.

waiting for the sick feeling to pass

what treatments they were being given

Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The

There is persistent, poor anger control or abusive behavior.

she began to lose her appetite, and strong odors became intolerable.

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

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so

She felt as if she were a helpless child.

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

in the hierarchy, addressing my errors was Ball's role.

I asked her about this. But she couldn't put her finger on what made her unhappy. The most common complaint she made is one I've heard often from nursing home residents I've met: "It just isn't home." To Alice, Longwood House was a mere facsimile of home. And having a place that genuinely feels like your home can seem as essential to a person as water to a fish.

One of the reasons for this dramatic shift in how decisions are made in medicine was a 1984 book