Complications

a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science

Hardcover, 269 pages

English language

Published Nov. 19, 2002 by Metropolitan Books.

ISBN:
978-0-8050-6319-6
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OCLC Number:
48383609

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4 stars (2 reviews)

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause a young woman with …

14 editions

Subjects

  • Autobiography
  • Chirurg
  • Anecdotes
  • Surgeons
  • Surgery
  • Medical Errors
  • General Surgery
  • Biography
  • Atul Gawande

Places

  • United States