Atul Gawande on Medicine and Mortality
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Probably the hardest part about implementing the checklist is it was a change in the culture of the operating room because the highest value of the operating room used to be the autonomy of the surgeon. The surgeon was the fighter pilot, that we decide everything that happens. And you know you you call it an operating theater in many countries it's it's the stage onto which the surgeon s steps up and everybody is expected to be working for the surgeon when in fact what we needed to do was to move away from the fighter pilot and more towards the pit crew that we're all here in service of a goal together and now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
I have had a lot of highly qualified people on this podcast, but I think my guest today may take the cake. He is a surgeon at one of the best hospitals in the United States, Brigham and Women's in Boston. He is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health as well as at Harvard Medical School. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker and he was for three years under Joe Biden, the assistant administrator of USAID.
And finally, of course, he's a very distinguished author of multiple bestsellers. Um, this is one of those interviews where I really try to convey the breadth of somebody's work. We start with some of Atul's early writings, trying to give a sense of uh the nature of medicine, the nature of doctors, as neither just capital as scientists who are applying these abstract, objectively correct principles to each case with no room for uncertainty. know as the kind of liberal arts practitioners who are superior to any set of rules because of their ability to judge. There's a lot of room for ambiguity, for hard decisions, for moral trade-offs in medicine, Artoul argues.
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