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 must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the lack of financial education for medical professionals despite the crucial role money plays in their practice.
Atul Gawande's quote reflects the gap in medical education regarding financial literacy. While medical training prepares professionals to care for patients, it often neglects the practical aspects of healthcare economics, leaving doctors unprepared to navigate the financial complexities they encounter once they begin practicing. Understanding what services are covered and the associated costs is essential for making informed decisions that affect both patient care and personal finances.
In practice
In a presentation about financial planning for new doctors.
A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
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 arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
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.
No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself.
Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
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