{"author":"Atul Gawande","author_id":"Atul+Gawande","total_quotes":49,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["death-and-dying"],"id":1956,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. And if we recognised the opportunity, the two-minute WHO checklist is just a start.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["change"],"id":3092,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"Instead they choose to accept their fallibilities. They recognised the simplicity and power of using a checklist.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["human-nature"],"id":4273,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"People seemed to have two different selves—an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients’ overall pain ratings even after they’d experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. “That wasn’t so terrible,” they’d reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["life","memory","pain"],"id":7514,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"We are besieged by simple problems.... Checklists can provide protection.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["checklist","complexity","errors","problem-solving","problems"],"id":21477,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"We are all plagued by failures - by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber — a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could try it.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["human-nature"],"id":37933,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["health","community","world "],"id":43473,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"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.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["hero","day","me "],"id":55510,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity — and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question — still unanswered — is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity.","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["human-nature"],"id":66979,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"},{"text":"[We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?","author":"Atul Gawande","tags":["end-of-life-care","medicine"],"id":74499,"author_id":"Atul+Gawande"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}