Quotes About Uncertainty

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity — and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question — still unanswered — is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity.

But he agreed that it could not be ruled out.

The likelihood of my initial hunch being right was too low

But for whatever reasons—hubris, inattention, wishful thinking, hesitation, or the uncertainty of the moment—I let the opportunity pass.

there was nothing for them to do but wait.

Everyone understands, though, that a great deal of uncertainty about what to do for people will always remain.

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

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.

We had no backup plan should disaster have occurred.

In the face of the unknown—the always nagging uncertainty about whether, under complex circumstances, things will really be okay—

When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

there's always something. We want these choices. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this? There

I had to wonder if we were right to operate on him.

I froze, not knowing quite what to say.

At times, they made her wonder if she had the right doctors

You have a cough that won't go away—and then? It's not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he's still trying to learn.

Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off—or even alive.

without a biopsy, we cannot rule it out." He paused for a moment to let her and her father absorb this.

He hesitated before going on.

but I began to have doubts about pulling out the screw.

and you will find that the larger, starker, and more painful difficulty is the still abundant uncertainty that exists over what should be done in many situations.

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

But doubts nevertheless creep in.

She said she would not go ahead with surgery.