27 Quotes by Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher who has made significant contributions to improving healthcare and patient safety. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a staff surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Gawande has written several bestselling books, including "Complications," "The Checklist Manifesto," and "Being Mortal," which explore the challenges and complexities of modern medicine and offer practical solutions for improving healthcare delivery. He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine and has been recognized for his advocacy work on healthcare policy and reform. (Bio)
Atul Gawande Quotes
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. (Meaning)
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. (Meaning)
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.
We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.
Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.
Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
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.
Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.
We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
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.
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.
The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.
― Atul Gawande Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
