An Analysis Of Atul Gawande Crafts An Alluring View Of The Medical Unknown Using Tales Of His Personal Medical Mistakes

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US, right behind heart disease and cancer. More than 200,000 people die annually as a result of diagnostic mistakes and negligence by healthcare professionals (Washingtonpost, 2016). In the healthcare industry, even the smallest mistakes and oversight could lead to severe consequences for both the patient and professionals. A healthcare professional would be held liable for any discrepancies that causes harm. The following case will analyze the ethical issue and negligence that lead to the death of an elderly woman.

Atul Gawande in his article “When the Doctor Makes Mistakes” exposes the mystery, uncertainty and fallibility of medicine in true stories that involve real patients. In a society where attorneys protect hospitals and physicians from zealous trials from clients following medical errors, doctors make mistakes is a testimony that Gawande a representative of other doctors speak openly about failures within the medical fields. In this article, Gawande exposes those errors with an intention of showing the entire society and specifically those within the medicine field that when errors are hidden, learning is squelched and those within the system are provided with an opportunity to continue committing the same errors. What you find when you critically analyse Gawande, “When Doctors Make Mistakes essay is how messy and uncertain medicine turns out to be. Throughout the entire article you experience the havoc within the medicine field as the inexperienced doctor misapplies a central line in a patient.

Chasing Zero is a documentary which was meant to both educate the viewer on the prevalence of medical harm as well as to enlighten both the public and health care providers on the preventability of these events (Discovery, 2010). The documentary expounded on the fact each year more people die each year from a preventable medical error than die due to breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents or AIDS (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Medical harm can result from adverse drug events, surgical injuries, wrong-site surgery, suicides, restraint-related injuries, falls, burns, pressure ulcers and mistaken patient identities (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Incidences of medical error have been reported in the media for many years. The most startling

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

"Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error…" (John Hopkins Medicine). This soaring number has caused medical errors to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. For many people, medicine seems foreign and unknown. People who have lost loved ones due to medical error desperately look for a reason, and many times that blame falls upon doctors. Media has put a negative connotation on doctors as well, causing their reputation to plummet whenever a hospital procedure turns badly. A renown surgeon and author, Atul Gawande, uses his knowledge and experience to give people a new perspective on medicine. In the article "When Doctors Make Mistakes," Gawande uses rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos to prove the need for a change in the medical systems and procedures. He analyzes how the public looks at doctors, giving a new perspective to enlighten the reader that even the best doctors can make mistakes.

1. Dr. Gawande explains that in his training as a surgeon, he has struggled with the fear of not being able to fix a problem for a patient, even when he knows the odds are not good. If you were Dr. Gawande’s patient, what would you like him to know about your hopes for how he would handle a difficult situation like this?

I always new that there was a lot of medical errors occurring in our country. What I did not thought about it was the fact that medical errors are not only occurred while providing care, but it is the action of not providing the care needed on time manner.

As described by Dr. Atul Gawande in his book Complications, medicine “is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge… fallible individuals” making medicine different from other scientific fields

Quality health care is an issue in America for everyone, despite our numerous tests and advances in technology. In his article, “Overkill,” Atul Gawande argues against a common assumption that our healthcare system is the best because of these medical advances. In fact, Gawande claims that our health care provides much unnecessary care that often causes harm and that costs a lot . He follows that claim by redefining “low-value care” as “no-value care” and provides considerable scientific data along with his own experience with his own patients to support his claim. He also states logical reasons by referring to expert authorities who critique our health care by viewing it from an economic perspective: like talking about information asymmetry where a doctor is more informed than the patient, thus the doctor has more power over the patient. All of these emphases strongly defend his controversial claim. But what stands out most is how Gawande uses several stories showing vastly different outcomes, depending on how informed the patient and doctor are including offering non invasive treatments. We need to explore how his unusual storytelling strategy exposes how surgeons and patients should care more about quality than the mere quantity of tests and what alternatives are available to change the unnecessary over testing and over-diagnosis which prevent good health care.

Atul Gawande uses the description as a mode of discourse to convey his message of imperfection in medicine. An example of this that Gawande presented was his own experience that he had. Gawande remarks on mistakes in medicine by saying, “Mistakes do happen. We think of them as aberrant; they are anything but.” When the patient, called Louis Williams, was brought into the hospital, she was unconscious and not responsive. Gawande and his crew performed tracheostomy because

Section 2 of this report, Errors in Health Care: A Leading Cause of Death and Injury, surveys the writing on mistakes to evaluate current comprehension of the greatness of the issue and distinguishes various issues that hinder consideration regarding persistent security. A general absence of data on and attention to mistakes in human services by buyers and shoppers makes it unthinkable for them to request better care. The way of life of pharmaceutical make a desire of flawlessness and ascribes mistakes to lack of regard or inadequacy. Obligation concerns demoralize the surfacing of mistakes and correspondence about how to amend them. The absence of unequivocal and reliable models for understanding wellbeing makes holes in authorizing and accreditation

Today if you were to say doctor to someone, the first thing that pops into their heads is life savers. Although that is true some can be killing innocent or guilty people by their malpractice When I became able to read I started to notice how sloppy my doctor’s handwriting was. I thought to myself how can anyone read that. I became scared that I would get the wrong medication. In this study of misdiagnosis conducted by An Institute of Medical Report Committee on Quality of Health Care in America Institute of Medicine National Academy Press Washington, D.C. (2014) said that 42% that believed that an error occurred only 40% of them had been misdiagnosed this is a serious problem that could allow someone to die .By examining evidence and background information about the reasons doctors’ commit malpractice the causes and effects from obamacare and and discussing current actions being taken to address the problem, this essay will explore the problem with why doctors’ commit malpractice and the causes and effects of obamacare in order to enact change, I will send a survey to my local hospital with this essay.

Life is lived under the assumption that every decision that is made is correct. Fallacies and cognitive biases are usually never taken into account. Since, life is lived in the present rather than the past. By addressing the example given in William Langewieshe’s Columbia’s Last Flight and in Atul Gawande‘s When Doctors Make Mistakes.

In the old time, clinical work in hospitals involved doctors listening to patients’ stories of illness before basing their diagnosis on indirect evidence. However, because of the development of new techniques and technologies, including the stethoscope, it allowed doctors to examine all cases more carefully. From this point on, doctors began to focus on the diseases themselves, and their impact on the body, instead of listening to their patients. Additionally, with the help of these new techniques and technologies, doctors gained much power and status because no-one could challenge their stories of illness therefore the patient’s own experience or perception became less important than the doctor’s judgment. As a result, the clinicians' ‘gaze’ of medical perception and experience on the patients become the only "objective truth" for the illness. However, although this "clinical gaze" of clinicians gazing patients helps the doctor narrow down their focus on the pathology, the organ, and the lesion that makes medicine treatment more rational, less theoretical and more practical, it have two effects, which are, first, make the clinicians to exclude structure factors in the treatment and, second, make the clinicians have the absolute authority in defining the illness, that can cause doctors to give out inaccurate treatment to the patients. The rest of my papers will be focused on how these two effects of clinical gaze can create difficulty on the treatment between health care

One single mistake by them can take the patient’s life. Similarly, if the doctor prescribed the wrong medicine or the wrong dosages of medicine, it might become the route of various diseases (“What are the dangers from using drugs?”).