Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is an American surgeon, public health researcher and advisor, and bestselling author. He writes extensively on medicine, morality, mortality, and public health issues.
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Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
How do you talk about death with a dying loved one? Dr. Atul Gawande explores death, dying and why even doctors struggle to discuss being mortal with patients, in this Emmy-nominated documentary. “Aging and dying - you can’t fix those," says Dr. Gawande.
Insisting that people are equally worthy of respect is an especially challenging idea today. In medicine, you see people who are troublesome in every way: the complainer, the person with the unfriendly tone, the unwitting bigot, the guy who, as they say, makes “poor life choices.”
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Modern medicine has transformed the dangers of birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should do.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying.
Practicing surgeon Atul Gawande discusses the four important parts of talking with terminally ill patients about their end-of-life care. Rather than pressing patients to make hard decisions, Gawande emphasizes the importance of asking questions about their hopes and fears.
Atul Gawande talks about death at the 2010 New Yorker Festival.
How do we improve in the face of complexity? Atul Gawande has studied this question with a surgeon’s precision.
So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all.
On Wednesday, October 24, HMS and HSPH Professor Atul Gawande applied his observations from the fields of sports, music, schools, and medicine, to a discussion of how different professions produce top-level performers.
Photo Credit: Lisa Lake / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
