How Doctors Think By Jerome Groopman

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.

All too often in regards to medical treatment, physicians are taught everything known about the scientific approaches to disease but still fail to realize the important details of how the disease impacts the individual. Many physicians do not show empathy to their patients and instead just focus on the current diagnosis and the probable outcome. This creates a divide between patient and provider and can even lead to negative feelings of the patient that far outweigh the diagnosis itself. A feeling of hopelessness and despair may accompany the empty feeling that comes with failing to explore the patient’s perspective on care. In this essay, Parrish states,

"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.

Blendon, R. DesRoches, C. Brodie, M., Benson, J. Rosen, A., & Schneider, A. (2002). Views of practicing physicians and the public on medical errors. New England Journal of Medicine. 347, 1933-1940.

My time as an Emergency Room Medical Scribe has been insightful to a point that it has solidified my career path. Prior to entering this field of work, I didn’t realize how little I had known about terminology, doctor-patient interaction, or procedures. With a behind the scenes look, I could not only view but understand the reasoning behind a physician’s medical decision making. For example, there was once a patient who had the chief complaint of abdominal pain. This patient had been to the ER multiple times in the past and after a multitude of physical exams and imaging there was nothing to show as abnormal. Hitherto, the physician I was working with had a lengthy discussion with the patient and decided to do a CT after explaining the risks.

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

With the statement, “warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon 's knife or the chemist 's drug” physicians are given the responsibility to step down from their systematic ways of scientific thinking and make decisions on the level of human kind. The modern oath also provides for the necessary address of issues in liability in relation with a physicians judgment. This is predominately done by promoting the uniting of colleagues and defending a physicians right to be unsure in a world of so many unknowns. This acceptance and appreciation is essential for fostering a comradely among physicians that challenges each to think independently, dispute their own peers and still be conducive of making advancements.

According to the Institute of Medicine, “At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors” (Kohn et al.). Despite the unfortunate consequences, medical errors provide an important foundation for medicine. An immense uncertainty envelopes the medical field, and frequent leaps must be made. Some of these ventures are prosperous; however, many render unsuccessful. In Complications, Atul Gawande crafts an alluring view of the medical unknown using tales of his personal medical mistakes. Through the use of ethos, logos, and pathos, Atul Gawande argues that medicine’s vast uncertainty has beneficial influence upon society.

In the novel, No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine by Dr. Rachel Pearson, the author, Dr. Pearson, encounters several patients and experiences several personal challenges that builds her role as a doctor and helps her realize the social injustices in the healthcare system. With the personal encounters she faces with her patients, her family and her peers, Dr. Pearson learns that there are several flaws in the healthcare system that is beyond the doctor’s power to fix. She also learns that the education she receives progressively builds as she meets new patients and learns about their individual cases. She begins to understand that the nature of her education is surprising because one cannot fully understand something unless they have experienced it. Consequently, Dr.

The Atlanta-based internist is concerned with how recipients and providers of medical services receive and make health advice and recommendations, respectively. He rues the current practice of medicine, which now pays more emphasis to data or evidence: anything that the data reveals are immediately taken as hard science, with the results taken from studies that claim to “represent a consistently reliable representation of the real world of human beings” i.e., those who do not participate in the studies. For Paul, the data or studies could mean

The patient's idea of the physician is in contrast to the narcissistic patient's contempt, and disregard for the physician, who is keeping a sense of superiority over illness. Only the most senior physician in

Sometimes physicians go so far as to make patients feel belittled and helpless. Patients, in turn, are relatively passive and accommodating, at least while they are with their doctors"(du Pre 53).

In Reinventing Medicine, Larry Dossey explores how the methods of healing transformed after the American Civil War. He traces the footsteps of medicines evolution through three distinct eras that are imbedded in our culture. Era I is a physical medicine approach that is practiced in modern health care today through the healing remedies such as drugs, surgery, and radiation. Dossey aims to prove to the world that though Era I provides countless benefits to the art of healing, that there are limitations to it. In order to move past these confines, Era II, also referred to as mind and body medicine, evolved. This era proves that our feelings and thoughts deeply affect our body’s health. Dossey declares it vital that instead of using one or the

The story attempts to reach people that being a doctor, doesn’t mean they are hundred percent right all the time. It also persuades people to not laugh or making joke with any kind of superstition. Things might happen, we never know. The author uses an anecdotal evidence from herself, she started feeling weird and uncomfortable that there

It was 2:37 p.m. The patient in the doctor's waiting room was watching the top