Being A Practicing Surgeon, Atul Gawande Essay

nurse, and anytime I would wait for her shift to end in the office, I would watch her do tons of paperwork that took up to three hours to complete. It drove me insane, but as I grew older, much older, I realized I wanted to help people. My idea of being a doctor expanded when I would read many articles on social media about their experiences that made them become some of the best doctors in the world today. When it came time to pick out my summer reading book, I had two choices. The first book was

In the New York Times bestseller Being Mortal, surgeon and author Atul Gawande tackles just what may be the most difficult challenge of his profession, learning how to handle the ‘end-of-life process.’ Throughout his book, he recites the stories of several individuals, in which the trajectory from a state of independence to one of death can easily be traced in each. Although Gawande does acknowledge that death is inevitable, he emphasizes that individuals of society, especially those that work in

But by the 1920’s, documents concerning surgery were over half of the sum of total articles. Surgery was being considered more “professional” by the people due to someone like William Halsted, who implemented the use of rubber gloves to prevent infection or to the American College of Surgeons, who in 1917 founded the Hospital Standardization program to help shift the role of hospitals from being a place for the poor to die, to a place where lives can be saved. This made the impression of a hospital

Being Mortal and its Consequences 1. Introduction In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande uses his experiences as a surgeon, professor and public health professional to discuss many facets of Western end-of-life care and the process of growing old in a modern age. Overall, I have found that three overpowering themes in this novel are security versus autonomy, a need for pragmatism surrounding the concept of death, and our medicalized society’s devaluation of hospice and palliative care. Regarding these themes

It is truly fascinating the amount of trauma and mutilation that one human being can endure. Subdural hematoma, aortic rupture, diabetic ketoacidosis, internal and external blast injuries, acute myocardial infarction, or even third degree burns are no match for modern medicine. In times past, these conditions or injuries were beyond the physicians control and presumed fatal to the individual. However, survival percentages are now higher, and can be attributed to medical advancement and the use of

Patients visit their doctors expecting to be diagnosed, prescribed, and treated. For several patients, this optimistic outlook is in fact the order of things. But, for many others, medicine is an experimental endeavor and very human in nature. Atul Gawande, in his collection of essays entitled Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, sheds light on this view of medicine as a field of possibilities and dead ends, improvements and failures. In spite of the many changes brought forth

perspective, Dr. Atul Gawande, in his book, Being Mortal (2014), drives home several important points as a 50-year-old practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In his introduction, Gawande points to the weekly seminar he attended, “called Patient-Doctor—part of the school’s effort to make us more rounded and humane physicians”, indicating that, in his case, “the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise”. Furthermore, Gawande explains

While the history of American medical ethics dates back four centuries (Baker, 2013), it is critical to differentiate between what was strictly medical ethics; the ethics between physician and patient, physician and physician, and physician and community versus bioethics: all of the aforementioned with the addition of scientific research involving human subjects “…in reaction to researchers’ exploitation of vulnerable populations, most notably the 399 African-American males deceived into serving

10/1/15 The History of Surgery We’ve come a long way in medicine but the beginning was rough and painful. But what is surgery? Surgery is a profession defined by its authority to cure by means of bodily invasion. The risks of cutting into a living human being have always been feared, the benefits have only climbed slowly up and soon started to show improvements. But the changes to surgery have proved the development of the human races ability to heal their own. Surgery today is probably no longer the