Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Atul Gawande is the bestselling author of four books, including Complications, which was nominated for a National Book Award, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, a New Yorker staff writer, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making surgery safer around the world.

Sometimes in medicine, the only way to truly understand what is going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. Among the best books on health care, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is exploratory surgery on medicine, exposing a science not in its idealized form, but as it is: complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.

Atul Gawande provides an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is scarce, and decisions must be made. He investigates how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad through dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors. He also shows us what happens when medicine meets the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; and a television newscaster with severe blushing that prevents her from doing her job. Gawande paints a richly detailed portrait of people and science while confronting the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives.

Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties at the heart of modern medicine while remaining open to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.

Author: Atul Gawande

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0805063196/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 2584 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #256,642 in Books

#114 in General Surgery

#201 in Medical Education & Training (Books)

#464 in Medical Professional Biographies