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| Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science | 
 enlarge | Author: Atul Gawande
Creator: William David Griffith
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $34.00
Buy New: $12.55
You Save: $21.45 (63%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (145 reviews)
Sales Rank: 841386
Format: Abridged, Audiobook, Cd
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 6
Pages: 5
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 4.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1559278587
Dewey Decimal Number: 617.092
EAN: 9781559278584
ASIN: 1559278587
Publication Date: April 5, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers. Complications is a book with heart and an excellent bedside manner, celebrating rather than berating doctors for being merely human. --Rob Lightner
Product Description
A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine.
Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against 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; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives.
At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 140 more reviews...
 I've been slashed April 18, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I find this book which has gotten such rave reviews disappointing. Dr. Gawande addresses a number of issues which are pertinent to surgical practice. However,I found the book to be superficial and lacking of "heart".
I will elicudate. Dr. Gawande states frequently that surgeons slash their way into a patient.I suspect that this is for dramatic effect.There are other examples of this such as the description of an autopsy.He tones it down later.He treds lightly on the fact that doctors don't want to own their mistakes which is why there is no improvement in medical care over 20 years ago despite huge advances in both technology and costs.
The only Surgeon I have ever known who "slashed" his way into a patient ended up losing his privileges...thank God but it took many years and a yeoman's effort and those who spoke up were alienated and shunned. It was not as simple as is portrayed in this book.I do laud him for bringing up the "good doctors going bad" issue. It is a huge problem and bad doctors are often covered for years and years while patients are repetitively injured. It is also very harmful to the doctor who is creating the problem. The cost of this problem to patients, hospitals and society is staggering.
I looked up the reference that computers were better than doctors at diagnosis. It is not about medical diagnosis, it was about psychologists' diagnosis. The second article was from 1954...A bit dated. before the computer era.
I laud him for the courage in mentioning his screwed up tracheostomy attempt. There are numerous methods for both intubation and percutanous guided tracheostomy techniques that have been available for 20 years. I have to wonder why he was unaware of these. The technique that he describes for subclavian vein cathethers is also not as safe as other methods which use a small guage finding needle. I have to wonder why 20-30 years after these problems were identified that this young doctor was not being instructed in these techniques.
His chapter on bariatric surgery is notable for his mentioning of the commercialization of medicine an increasingly dangerous trend is appropriate. At this point bariatric surgery has been shown to be helpful for a large number of patients, but without question medicine has been commercialized.
His section on uncertainty is the best part of this book. He saved the best for last.
Nonetheless, I find his "laissez-faire" attitude to these problems even more worrisome.I find little actual feeling that he cared about his patients in this book. This is not surprising as it pervades medicine today.
I haven't found this book to be a thriller.It lacks depth of character. If he had connected with us and his patients emotionally I believe that it would have been a much more powerful work.
 Complications; A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science April 3, 2008
Open, honest, sometimes frightening, sometimes amazing. An outstanding and humble reminder to readers that medicine is an imperfect science and doctors are not God. Not only worth reading, worth re-reading.
Surgery Patient Weighs in on Surgery Book March 31, 2008
As a double lung transplant recipient, I am bewitched by stories told from the medical professional perspective. Not unlike when I was in my early twenties and discovered the shocking truth that my parents were in fact human just like me, I have grown increasingly aware that those who perform superhuman tasks like surgery are also just people--neither superior or inferior to myself. This is both a comforting and scary realization and one that has prompted my new found hunger to understand life on the other side of the exam curtain.
Atul Gawande's book "Complications" seemed a perfect choice on this quest to discovering a window into the world of medicine and, in particular, surgery. While this proved true, I never anticipated the honesty with which Dr. Gawande writes of his experiences as a surgeon in training. At times his ability to expose the facades medicine uses to shield us patients from a physician's true lack of experience or confidence was almost too disturbing to take. I had to ask myself, "Do I really want to know this?" At other times, I felt vindicated in knowing that a suspicion I had about how things work was right on target. Often, I felt as though I was gathering useful inside information that would help me in advocating for myself in the future.
As a patient, it is obvious that the world of medicine is both astounding in what it can do and broken in the way patients are treated and systems are run. Perhaps what I appreciated most about "Complications" was Gawande's willingness to investigate some of these "elephants in the room." With the intelligence of a surgeon and the heart of a compassionate man, he takes an honest look at medicine's tendency to blame the patient (psychologically) when no other solution can be found for chronic pain. In an in-depth and unique way, he explores the delicate balance of physical conditions and human emotion in relation to obesity. Gawande walks the thin line between using all that medical science has to offer while still allowing room for the mysterious. He does not blame anyone, physician or patient, for what is unknown--he only analyzes it in such a way that this reader could not help but be changed. There are many parts of this book which have altered my perspectives forever.
I highly recommend this book--it is not overly technical and rarely boring.
Overall, I find myself hoping that Gawande is not a physician out on a limb by himself, but a representation of the evolution of medical attitudes and approaches to complex problems. A hospital full of Atul Gawandes? Now, that's a place I'd like to go for my healthcare.
Tiffany Christensen
Author of "Sick Girl Speaks!"
 Almost a new age medical classic March 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am a great fan of Dr Gawande.
Since the first time I read his essay in the New England journal of medicine, I have expected more from him.I have read most of his pieces from the New yorker.
I think he is amazingly talented and that he will only turn out more and better books.
As a layman, I would give this a 5 stars: for once Dr Gawande has been able to describe in a medical person's perspective that would register with a layman.without the glamour and jazz.
Our fears,doubts and tribulations.
For medical personnel: this would be a 3 stars: not because it is subpar, but because he tends to simplify this a little more than I would like him too. He lost me through 3/5 ths of the book when he hit the Bariatric surgery part. I had to struggle to get back in again.
I would have liked him to tackle the other part of patient care that we, being PC, tend to avoid: difficult patients, people who live of the system, a lazy and inefficient system which chews residents and fellows and makes a mockery of ideal medicine.Of a profit driven insurance system and a medicare/ medicaid system which promotes mediocrity.
But maybe that is another book.
a must read for pre meds and parents of pre meds.
 Great insight into the medical profession and into people in general March 19, 2008
This is an honest and open look at the medical profession. If you are suspect of doctors or if you look up to them, this audio book will bring you closer to reality.
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