Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is an American surgeon, public health researcher and advisor, and bestselling author. He writes extensively on medicine, morality, mortality, and public health issues.
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Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Practicing surgeon Atul Gawande discusses the four important parts of talking with terminally ill patients about their end-of-life care. Rather than pressing patients to make hard decisions, Gawande emphasizes the importance of asking questions about their hopes and fears.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying.
Modern medicine has transformed the dangers of birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should do.
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On Wednesday, October 24, HMS and HSPH Professor Atul Gawande applied his observations from the fields of sports, music, schools, and medicine, to a discussion of how different professions produce top-level performers.
Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid.
Atul Gawande talks about death at the 2010 New Yorker Festival.
How do we improve in the face of complexity? Atul Gawande has studied this question with a surgeon’s precision.
At The New Yorker Festival in 2012, Atul Gawande asks audience members to think about how proficient hospitals should be at rescuing patients.
In his new book ‘Being Mortal,’ surgeon and author Atul Gawande tells the miraculous story of a menagerie that gave sick people a reason to live.
Photo Credit: Lisa Lake / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
