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Reviewed by Alan Choate A New England Journal of Medicine study of more than 30,000 hospital admissions in the state of New York found that four percent of patients suffered complications with their treatment. Two-thirds of those were caused by of errors in care, although only one percent involved actual negligence. That means doctors got it right more than 96 percent of the time, and in 99 percent of cases medical professionals did the best they could—but it’s not perfection, so it’s not considered good enough, author and surgeon Atul Gawande notes in the early pages of Complications. Indeed, the study estimated that 44,000 patients die each year because of medical error. Gawande writes that “[A]ll doctors make terrible mistakes,” such as skipping crucial steps during surgery or leaving surgical instruments inside patients. “The fact is that virtually everyone who cares for hospital patients will make serious mistakes, and even commit acts of negligence, every year.” Every doctor, every year. This should be a deeply frightening book. In Gawande’s company,
though, these scary facts become points of departure for exploring what
is unknown about the human body. Most of the stories detailed in these
thoroughly researched, though informal, essays come from Gawande’s
patients and colleagues—doctors who became careless and burned
out, a TV broadcaster who couldn’t stop blushing, people with
unexplainable nausea and those who turned to surgery to control an insatiable
appetite. The reader gets a surgeon’s-eye view of the body through
Gawande’s clinical descriptions of surgical procedures, and his
honest, let’s-follow-this-as-far-as-it-goes approach is fascinating
and comforting at the same time. |
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