Quotes About Practice

Living is a kind of skill.

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice. Many

Medicine was just another a tool you could try, no different from a healing ritual or a family remedy and no more effective.

We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future. So

There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

They believe in practice, not talent.

Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot.

Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.

one's willingness to engage in sustained training.

top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do.

and then define a pattern around them.

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

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

All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.

Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability. *

Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve their operating time while others failed to improve at all. Practice, it turned out, did not necessarily make perfect.

I told him of how, almost thirty years before, my parents had narrowed their choices of where to take up practice to either Athens, Ohio, or Hancock, Michigan, in the upper peninsula.

Do we ever say that we need them to agree to it anyway? I've never seen it. Given the stakes, who in their right mind would agree to be practiced upon?

and a completely unfair question popped into my mind.

The average doctor in a high-risk practice like surgery or obstetrics is sued about once every six years. Seventy percent of the time, the suit is either dropped by the plaintiff or won by the doctor in court. But the cost of defense is high, and when doctors lose, the average jury verdict is half a million dollars. General

that many decisions made by physicians appear to be arbitrary—highly variable, with no obvious explanation.

But it's not only the breadth and quantity of knowledge that has made medicine complicated. It is also the execution—the practical matter of what knowledge requires clinicians to do.

How could anyone who makes a mistake of that magnitude be allowed to practice medicine?

Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.