Better

May 28th, 2007

I am reading the book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.  This book has been a real treat so far.  Dr. Gawande’s vivid writing has really pulled me in.  He spends a lot of time talking about specific life experiences and how doctors analyze them to improve their practice of medicine.  His writing gets the reader to think about complex topics in a way that could bring about individual improvement.  My favorite paragraph so far is in the introduction: “Betterment is a perpetual labor.  The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing and medicine is nowhere spared that reality.  To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only humans ourselves.  We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns.  Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy complicated connection between the two.  It is to live a life of responsibility.  The question, then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility.  Just by doing this work, one has.  The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”  This quote really highlights a fundamental challenge of medicine that he is trying to address; that is trying to always help patients in spite of fundamental human flaws.  He gives nice insight into how to evaluate one’s life and actions with the goal of being better at whatever one does.  It’s a great book.  I would recommend it to everyone, medical and non-medical.

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