If We Took Away The Ability To

What About Regular Professionals, Who Just Want To Do What They Do As Well As They Can?

No Matter What Measures Are Taken, Doctors Will Sometimes Falter, And It Isn't Reasonable To Ask That We Achieve Perfection. What Is Reasonable Is To Ask That We Never Cease To Aim For It.

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.

There Are Times When You Have Sharp Elbows, And People Are Trying To Muscle You Out Of Certain Meetings - Because Then People Could Leak To The Press That You Had A Role In Certain Decisions. I, At Twenty-six, Was Very Impatient And Didn't Know How To Keep My Powder Dry. I Was Running A Team Of Seventy-five People When I Had Never Been A Boss. I Was The Worst Boss Ever.

This Was Not Guilt: Guilt Is What You Feel When You Have Done Something Wrong. What I Felt Was Shame: I Was What Was Wrong.