In One Study, Old People Assigned To

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.

I Chose Surgery Because I Thought That Perhaps This Would Make Me More Like The Kind Of Person I Wanted To Be.

You Want To Ensure People Can Do It Right 99 Percent Of Time. When We Have To Fire One Of Our Surgical Trainees, It Is Never Because They Dont Have The Physical Skills But Because They Dont Have The Moral Skills - To Practise And Admit Failure.

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.

Better Is Possible. It Does Not Take Genius. It Takes Diligence. It Takes Moral Clarity. It Takes Ingenuity. And Above All, It Takes A Willingness To Try.