Atul Gawande Quotes

Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.

Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.

What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?

These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives.

In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.

And in stories, endings matter.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.

If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me.

When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor's pen. It's not that we make all the money. It's that we order all the money.

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.

Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.

If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.

Do what is right, and do it now.

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating.

We are besieged by simple problems.... Checklists can provide protection

We recruit for attitude and train for skill,