Human Interaction Is The Key Force In

The Striking Thing Is That Who Doesn't Really Have The Authority To Do Any Of This. It Can't Tell Governments What To Do. It Hires No Vaccinators, Distributes No Vaccine. It Is A Small Geneva Bureaucracy Run By Several Hundred International Delegates Whose Annual Votes Tell The Organization What To Do But Not How To Do It.…the Only Substantial Resource That Who Has Cultivated Is Information And Expertise.

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.

We've Created A Multitrillion-dollar Edifice For Dispensing The Medical Equivalent Of Lottery Tickets - And Have Only The Rudiments Of A System To Prepare Patients For The Near Certainty That Those Tickets Will Not Win. Hope Is Not A Plan, But Hope Is Our Plan.

If The Conversation People Think Is Coming Is The 'death Panel' Conversation, That's A Total Failure.

The Possibilities And Probabilities Are All We Have To Work With In Medicine, Though. What We Are Drawn To In This Imperfect Science, What We In Fact Covet In Our Way, Is The Alterable Moment-the Fragile But Crystalline Opportunity For One's Know-how, Ability, Or Just Gut Instinct To Change The Course Of Another's Life For The Better.