302 Quotes by Atul Gawande

The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?

Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again.

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.

Much of our work today has entered its own B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what software designers, financial managers, firefighters, police officers, lawyers, and most certainly clinicians do are now too complex for them to carry out reliably from memory alone. Multiple fields, in other words, have become too much airplane for one person to fly. Yet it is far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of substantial help.

If the conversation people think is coming is the ‘death panel’ conversation, that’s a total failure.

Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have, and, according to what little research has been done, having at least one daughter seems to be crucial to the amount of help you will receive.

ODTAA syndrome: the syndrome of One Damn Thing After Another.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society.

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. Many.