Maybe I’m just excited about hearing Atul Gawande in person at ANI in a few weeks, but I just spent 20 minutes listening to his Ted talk on “How We Heal Medicine.” While he’s known for his work with checklists, I found his other insights into healthcare really refreshing. I’ve embedded the video below and pulled out some of his best quotes at the bottom of this post.
“We’re in the deepest crisis of medicines’ existence due to something you don’t normally think about when you’re a doctor concerned with how you do good for people, which is the cost of healthcare.”
“We have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have…We’ve now discovered 4000 medical and surgical procedures. We’ve discovered 6000 drugs that I’m now licensed to prescribe.”
“As Doctors, we can’t know it all. We can’t do it all by ourselves.”
“We in Medicine, I think, our baffled by this question of cost. We want to say, this is just the way it is. This is what Medicine requires.”
“Complexity requires group success.”