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.
Interpretation
Travel bans may delay but not completely prevent the spread of disease.
This quote by Atul Gawande emphasizes the limitations of travel restrictions in controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases. It highlights that while such measures might temporarily reduce travel, they cannot fully contain the spread, which may ultimately lead to a worse situation if healthcare workers are unable to provide necessary treatment and support.
In practice
In a public health seminar discussing the effectiveness of travel restrictions during an outbreak.
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.
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.
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.
To quit smoking, you must first want to quit, but then you must also do the quitting
We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy.
But the real secret to lifelong good health is actually the opposite: Let your body take care of you.
Low-income people, racial or ethnic minorities, pregnant women, seniors, people with special needs, people in rural areas - they all have a much harder time accessing a dentist than other groups of Americans.
It is changes that are chiefly responsible for diseases, especially the greatest changes, the violent alterations both in the seasons and in other things. (:)...regimen and temperature, and one period of life to another.
Health is the greatest possession.
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