Go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s, and it was the discovery of heroic interventions, the ability to cure people with penicillin or do an operation to s….

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually ….

Over time I learned that there are two very different satisfactions that you can have in your life. One is the satisfaction of becoming skilled at so….

If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me..

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty..

After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last ….

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as ….

If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure..

I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also sp….

One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws ….

My own son has a congenital heart condition, where his life was saved by a cardiac surgeon stepping in at 11 days of life to save his life. But he is….

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change..

When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost..

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact….

Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whethe….

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You m….

We recruit for attitude and train for skill..

Once you start to ask patients about their priorities, you discover what they're living for. Once you uncover that, it helps you, as a doctor, decide….

I said there are at least two kinds of satisfaction, however, and the other has nothing to do with skill. It comes from human connection. It comes fr….

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own ar….