Complications: Surgeon's Notes On An Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

From the book's Introduction (by Atul Gawande):  Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.

The stakes are high, the liberties taken tremendous.

The thing that still startles me is how fundamentally human an endeavour it is.

Usually, when we think about medicine and its remarkable abilities, what comes to mind is the science and all it has given us to fight sickness and misery:  the tests, the machines, the drugs, the procedures.  And without question, these are at the center of virtually everything medicine achieves.

But we rarely see how it all actually works.

You have a cough that won't go away - and then?

It's not science you call upon but a doctor.

A doctor with good days and bad days.

A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut.

A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he's still trying to learn.

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure.

But it is not.

It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line.

There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing.

The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists.

And this gap complicates everything we do.

About the author:  Atul Gawande is a resident in surgery in Boston, Massachusetts, and a staff writer on medicine and science for The New Yorker.  He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he studied politics, philosophy and economics before deciding on a career in medicine.  He went on to receive his MD from Harvard Medical School as well as a Masters of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.  His writing has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and the New Yorker essay collection In Sickness and In Health.  He was an adviser to President Clinton on Health Policy.  Gawande lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.

Complications is Gawande's first book published in the United States in 2002 by Metropolitan Books.  It is divided into three distinct sections:  the first part examines the fallibility of doctors;  the second part focuses on mysteries and unknowns of medicine and the struggles with what to do about them;  and the third part centers on the core predicament of medicine - uncertainty.

Do check out Atul Gawande's website for more information.

I do not rate books based on true accounts and experiences.