What is the overall main point of Complications by Atul Gawande?
Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of stories based on the experiences of a surgical resident at a major teaching hospital in Boston. The author, Atul Gawande, M.D., presents a refreshingly humanistic approach to both surgery and to the care of patients in general.
What is the main point of education of a knife?
In “Education of a Knife,” Gawande discusses the process of how surgeons learn—by practice. He uses the example of his “first real procedure,” putting a central line, an intravenous line that would go into the main blood vessel of the heart, in a patient.
What is Complications in medical terms?
: a secondary disease or condition that develops in the course of a primary disease or condition and arises either as a result of it or from independent causes.
How doctors think Anne Dodge?
Excerpt: ‘How Doctors Think’ Anne Dodge had lost count of all the doctors she had seen over the past fifteen years. She guessed it was close to thirty. Her primary care doctor had opposed the trip, arguing that Anne’s problems were so long-standing and so well defined that this consultation would be useless.
How do doctors think errors?
Doctors make such errors when their thinking is overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates of a disease, and thus attribute symptoms to the wrong cause.
What is complications by Gawande about?
Complications is a book of anecdotes about a surgical resident’s experiences and impressions of the current health care environment. Gawande divides his stories into three sections: fallibility, mystery, and uncertainty.
What went wrong with surgeon Gawande?
Many readers will blanch at the cases Gawande describes, like the surgeon who biopsied the wrong part of a woman’s breast, delaying her cancer diagnosis by 18 months. Other failures are his own: He once needed to perform an emergency tracheotomy, a procedure he had little experience with, under time pressure.
How dangerous is Gawande’s Central line procedure?
In one section Gawande discusses a procedure in which he must put in a central line which goes into a major vein in your chest which can technically kill you. All he tells the patient is that he must put in a central line, not that it is dangerous or that it is his first time doing this procedure.
What makes Atul Gawande’s books so special?
But both books have rare qualities. Gawande is a physician who can step back from his ego and write with compassion and insight about the relationship between vulnerable sick people and those whose skill and judgment they are compelled to trust. Atul Gawande writes for The New Yorker, and I always read his articles as soon as I spot the by-line.