Gawande openly discusses the many gaps in our knowledge, such as how little we know about two of the most common of symptoms – pain and nausea.Īs the media brings us stories of negligent care and poor communication, he alerts us to even more glaring and hidden problems. As a whole, it is part thesis and part confessional. Only in a misplaced chapter on surgical conventions does the book briefly lose its way. You’ll wince as an inexperienced Gawande learns to put in a central line and cheer as a botched surgery is rescued at the last minute.Ĭomplications is a collection of essays written for the New Yorker but as a whole, it maintains remarkable narrative focus. Throughout the book, he comes across as warm, considered and non-judgmental – exactly the type of doctor you would want handling your care.īut it is his skill as a storyteller that makes Complications truly compelling, with prose as taut as you’ll find in any thriller, and drama that the creators of ER could only wish for. But Gawande the parent allows only the most experienced of surgeons to treat his own son. Gawande the doctor calls for patients to accept the need for residents to practice their techniques. These difficult issues are considered with balance and humanity. New techniques carry steep learning curves, and while doctors improve greatly with practice, that is scant consolation to first patients they treat. The books begins with a tour through an ethical minefield as Gawande considers why mistakes happen in medicine and how we should balance the quest for the best possible care with the need to train the next generation of doctors.

The “moments where medicine actually happens” are a fusion of science and intuition, knowledge and guesswork. Seen through his insider eyes, medicine is revealed as an imperfect science, full of “constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time, lives on the line”. In Complications, American surgeon Atul Gawande tells us otherwise. We look for doctors and surgeons to be faultlessly skilled and well-informed, and for medicine to be a field of order, knowledge and procedure. But in medicine, where lives are at stake, things are very different.

Science is very much a work in progress, where unanswered questions are accepted and experimentation is encouraged. Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted).Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Complications atul gawande review