Quotes from Atul Gawande

You count on experience and judgment. And it is hard not to be troubled by this.

He was still tied up with the crash victim, but I was able to interrupt to show him the X ray.

I asked him if I could have a look around.

But doubts nevertheless creep in.

What would cutting the man apart accomplish?

She said she would not go ahead with surgery.

Discussing a fantasy was easier—less emotional, less explosive, less prone to misunderstanding—than discussing what was happening before my eyes.

After a momentary hesitation, he decided to join me.

called him at home to hear how he had weathered the aftermath.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

Yet doctors remained undeterred.

It is affected by the order in which information is presented and how problems are framed.

I had given her the facts. But by including the fact that I was worried, I'd not only told her about the seriousness of the situation, I'd told her that I was on her side—I was pulling for her. The words also told her that, although I feared something serious, there remained uncertainties—possibilities for hope within the parameters nature had imposed.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives. This is the very marrow of being human.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals—from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly—but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not. *

The screw wasn't budging.

Baseball players, for example, are notoriously superstitious.

the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific—matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones.

Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications.

I warned her of the risks of infection and the signs to look for.

When he signed his contract for the 1999 season, he insisted that his salary be $1,200,000.99.