Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And in stories, endings matter.
Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.
Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
We recruit for attitude and train for skill.
When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.
We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.
Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?
Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.
My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.
Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can?
Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.
This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.
Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.
Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.
In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.
Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.
I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.
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.
If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.
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.
We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.
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.
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.
Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.
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.
Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.
I write because it's my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don't understand, and getting better at something.
I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock n' roll - it has to be good rock n' roll - and I still think it is true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.
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.