We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do. Atul Gawande
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More Quotes By Atul Gawande
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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...
  4. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments–which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and...
  5. 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...
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