When I Do An Operation, It's Half

I Think The Extreme Complexity Of Medicine Has Become More Than An Individual Clinician Can Handle. But Not More Than Teams Of Clinicians Can Handle.

Sometimes We Can Offer A Cure, Sometimes Only A Salve, Sometimes Not Even That. But Whatever We Can Offer, Our Interventions, And The Risks And Sacrifices They Entail, Are Justified Only If They Serve The Larger Aims Of A Person's Life. When We Forget That, The Suffering We Inflict Can Be Barbaric. When We Remember It The Good We Do Can Be Breathtaking.

Just Look At The List Of Who The Lowest-paid People Are. Pediatricians Are At The Bottom. You Would Also Look At Internists. You Would Look At Psychiatrists. You Would Look At Family Physicians, Hiv Specialists. People Who Take Care Of Chronic Illnesses By Seeing People Carefully Over Time, Those Are The People Who Get The Least Money. The People Who Have The Most Are People Like Orthopedic Surgeons, Interventional Cardiologists. And My Point Isn't That There Is Something Wrong With Heroism.

We Always Hope For The Easy Fix: The One Simple Change That Will Erase A Problem In A Stroke. But Few Things In Life Work This Way. Instead, Success Requires Making A Hundred Small Steps Go Right - One After The Other, No Slipups, No Goofs, Everyone Pitching In.

In Psychology, There's Something Called The Broken-leg Problem. A Statistical Formula May Be Highly Successful In Predicting Whether Or Not A Person Will Go To A Movie In The Next Week. But Someone Who Knows That This Person Is Laid Up With A Broken Leg Will Beat The Formula. No Formula Can Take Into Account The Infinite Range Of Such Exceptional Events.