complications a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science review

At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause a young woman with nausea that won't go away a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.

Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes.

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine.

Complications a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science review