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 book 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.
Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
