We Now Have 30 Percent, For Example,

In Every Industrialized Nation, The Movement To Reform Health Care Has Begun With Stories About Cruelty.

In Psychology, There's Something Called The Broken-leg Problem. A Statistical Formula May Be Highly Successful In Predicting Whether Or Not A Person Will Go To A Movie In The Next Week. But Someone Who Knows That This Person Is Laid Up With A Broken Leg Will Beat The Formula. No Formula Can Take Into Account The Infinite Range Of Such Exceptional Events.

Practice Is Funny That Way. For Days And Days, You Make Out Only The Fragments Of What To Do. And Then One Day You've Got The Thing Whole. Conscious Learning Becomes Unconscious Knowledge, And You Cannot Say Precisely How.

I Think The Extreme Complexity Of Medicine Has Become More Than An Individual Clinician Can Handle. But Not More Than Teams Of Clinicians Can Handle.

I Talked To Over Two Hundred Patients And Family Members About Their Experiences With Aging, Serious Illnesses, And The Big Unfixables. But I Also Spoke With Scores Of Physicians, And Especially Geriatricians, Palliative Care Doctors, Hospice Nurses, And Nursing Home Workers. The Biggest Thing I Found Was That When These Clinicians Were At Their Best, They Were Recognizing That People Had Priorities Besides Merely Living Longer. The Most Important And Reliable Way That We Can Understand What People's Priorities Are, Besides Just Living Longer, Is To Simply Ask. And We Don't Ask.