Many of us get uncomfortable when we think about this though. But unlike other professions where mistakes are more acceptable, in medicine there is a major difference. Because after all, it is their first time doing it. Junior doctors will fumble, they will hesitate and be unsure. Just like any other profession, junior doctors have less competence than senior ones. The most obvious one would be how much experience they have. Which means that just like any of us, their performance can be influenced by many conditions. Science is objective, doctors aren’t.ĭoctors are human. We often forget that doctors are practitioners of Science, not Science itself. They feel untouchable, and with their white coat on they portray a sense of authority over their patients. We generally think of doctors as some calm and collected soul. Pushing the job to doctors alone isn’t the solution – as patients we need to know what’s going on too. We have a responsibility to know about the system that treats us in order to use it well. Whether we like it or not, our health will deteriorate as we grow older. The distribution was a little weird, with a small number of stories feeling like a trip down memory lane rather than a focused argument.īut the things covered inside are still very perplexing and important for all of us to think about. Some chapters were very long, but others were only like five pages. This book felt very scattered and all over the place it seemed hard to keep track of what he was trying to say. I didn’t like this book as much as I did the other two of Atul Gawande’s books, Being Mortal and Better. Ideas Explored:įallibility, Mystery, Uncertainty Thoughts about the book: OverviewĬomplications. A messy, risky, but ultimately beautiful thing. But because of this false impression, we end up missing out on what medicine can actually offer if we see it for what it really is. When sick, we blindly cling on to the impression that medicine can heal us completely. Medicine is often perceived as more perfect than it is. It covers a lot of ground and at the end hopes to send us just one single message: We need to think more about Medicine and what it does. Lastly, he talks about uncertainty – how Science, for all it’s glory, is still surprisingly ineffective in telling doctors what to do. Next, he covers mysterious diseases that Science has no answers for and how medicine deals with them.

The first is about the fallibility of a doctor – how doctors, as revered as they are, are ultimately humans who are prone to error. It is organised into three broad chapters. We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it can be Context:Ĭomplications is a book about a surgeons’ thoughts.

Complications atul