Lisa's review of Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
Reading these Gawande books is as close to surgery, or medical school, as I ever want to get. So it's kind of vicarious adventure reading for me (while John reads Neal Stephenson). This new one could almost be a management book too, so it's a good thing I didn't know that or I wouldn't have read it.
There's a lot of hard things, we assume, in being a doctor, and these books don't duck a one. Gawande doesn't have answers. How do we fix the malpractice mess? When is it OK to let someone die? His last book talked about the paradox of having a system that requires doctors to learn "on the fly" and necessarily sometimes making mistakes; when not a one of us would choose to have any doctor but the most experienced. He doesn't just poetically opine about how hard these issues are. He actually wants to figure out a way to "do better" even though they seem impossible.
How is it that the seemingly lowest tech things are the hardest to change (getting doctors to wash t...more
There's a lot of hard things, we assume, in being a doctor, and these books don't duck a one. Gawande doesn't have answers. How do we fix the malpractice mess? When is it OK to let someone die? His last book talked about the paradox of having a system that requires doctors to learn "on the fly" and necessarily sometimes making mistakes; when not a one of us would choose to have any doctor but the most experienced. He doesn't just poetically opine about how hard these issues are. He actually wants to figure out a way to "do better" even though they seem impossible.
How is it that the seemingly lowest tech things are the hardest to change (getting doctors to wash t...more
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