Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Review
I enjoy reading about science/medical issues but have more of a liberal arts background than anything else and found this book nearly impossible to put down. A little bit into reading it, I jumped into the pool to track down my husband to let him know that if ever we or anyone we knew needed hernia surgery, there was a specific place in Canada we needed to go to. I was equally delighted to report to him about the uncertainty of the cause of panic attacks in a man who was having separate brain surgery and when they zapped a specific area in the brain, for which the response was normally a tickling sensation in the chest area, he responded with full-blown panic attack symptoms. That was the appeal of this book - balancing the known and the unknown of medicine and attempting to convey things in a way that made sense and allowed the reader to use the information and speculate on what was unknown.
The book is broken up into a series of essays, but they don't read like essays that were independently published and in fact, I did not know that they were until I'd finished the book. It reads quite smoothly. I found that there was an enormous amount of practical information, a decent amount of humility, and an attempt to explain the failings of medicine to solve all of man's problems, all from the perspective of someone who is often looking at these issues through the lens of surgery, which is typically how people look at medicine since it's the most tangible way to approach these things. Clearly, Gawande is a balanced and well-rounded individual - the book contains the only information I've ever come across about gastric bypass surgery outcomes that makes sense, despite it not being certain - and this from someone who clearly has never dealt with the complex issues those who need the surgery have.
In sum, an excellent book, easy pretty short read.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Feature
- ISBN13: 9780312421700
- Condition: New
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Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Overview
In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Specifications
Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers.
Complications is a book with heart and an excellent bedside manner, celebrating rather than berating doctors for being merely human.
--Rob Lightner Related Products
Customer Reviews
Complications: A Surgeon's notes - Paul -
Excellent book on the difficulties and ambiguities Surgeon's are faced with, and their skill and courage to make decisions and act.
A bipolar book - penorman -
I loved the first third of the book, because Gawande was relating his own personal experiences as a resident learning how to be surgeon. I thought those chapters were compelling because they was based on his own direct and often dramatic experiences. The rest of the book is very different. It is standard 'reporting' on various medical conditions not based on his own direct experience as a doctor, but based on things he has read, and interviews he has conducted. It is stuff that any reporter could have written, and lacks the immediate and personal nature of the first third of the book.
Parenthetically, this is the same transition that Jerome Groopman went through in New Yorker articles -- the first of which were riveting accounts of his own experiences as an oncologist dealing with specific patients. His later articles, like the last two thirds of Gawande's book, were dry "reporting" on medical issues.
Good read - S. R. Schnur - ME USA
It could well be that you will refuse to go to a hospital for anything if you read this book, but I found it fascinating. It is in three parts: Part one about the fallibility of doctors; part two about mysterious things doctors can't cure, and part three about the uncertainty of medicine. Throughout the book this interesting author holds the reader's attention.
When I was in college many years ago, my summer job was as a nurse's aide in a teaching hospital. After any death, the hospital asked the patient's family if they could perform an autopsy. Where I live now I understand the family has to actually pay if they want an autopsy. How in the world can doctors improve themselves if that is the case? I would jump at the chance for having a definitive answer about a loved one's death. Apparently, even when the doctor isn't sure why his/her patient died, he/she doesn't like to ask for an autopsy. I find that weird.
Any, I loved this book and will read all this doctor writes because his writing draws the reader in.
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