The article, The Score by Atul Gawande, illustrated the history of pregnancy deliveries with the article profiling Elizabeth Rourke and her journey of giving birth to her daughter. The Score is an article where I acquired knowledge from a topic that I knew very little about. For example, the process of how women are in labor and how long they must wait until they are “in labor.” In addition, how long they must wait until their contractions are in a certain pace, “the nurse asked if the contractions were five minutes apart and lasted more than a minute. No.…
Gawande starts his essay with a mistake. It was not a grammatical mistake, but one he made while operating on a woman who was a victim of a car crash. In the end it was not a serious mistake, as the patient went home healthy, but it was still a mistake. He then tells of how common errors can be and how they can happen, as well as how often a doctor is sued. He then explains how most hospitals have a meeting called Morbidity and Morality Conference, or M&M, where mistakes are reviewed and discussed for people to learn from.…
The Pain and Prejudice of Samady and Vaughn According to Dr. DaShanne Stokes, a Sociologist and pundit, “Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live.” What is prejudice? Merriam-Webster dictionary defines prejudice as “an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge” and “an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics.”…
Doctors carry a lot of responsibility; they are expected to save and of fix lives. Patients know there are medical miracles, and everyone wants to be that miracle. But doctors understand the reality. If someone is suffering terminally ill, is it ethical for a doctor to end the misery? Or should they wait around for the very slim chance of a medical miracle?…
There is no set time as to when to tell a patient they have a certain amount of weeks, months, or years left; therefore, it is a constant struggle for doctors to admit that there is nothing left for them to do and that the patient is going to die. The research that Dr. Gawande conducts to become better at conveying the news of death to his patients can assist him and other doctors in their struggle. There is always a chance that a patient could be the one, the breakthrough. This makes it even more difficult to know when it is taking too much out of the patient to continue treatment because there is that…
Response and Summary to “How Do We Heal Medicine” In Atul Gawande’s speech “How do we heal medicine”, the speaker assertively claims that healing medicine requires us to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. A good system was also required for reaching the new values. At the beginning of his speech, Gawande explained how is medicine system changed over the time. Not only by providing present and past data and analyzing those data, but also using Lewis Thomas’ book, “The Youngest Science” as a reference for his audience to under the difference of being a doctor between now and post.…
In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, bestseller author Atul Gawande son of both parents who were doctors and he, himself is a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He addresses his issues from his profession’s ultimate arguing. He is the author of three bestselling books and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He chose to examine the old age and how nursing, medicine, and healthcare plays in a role in for aging people. He wrote the novel through interviewing and in-sight experiences of his own patients and his family member such as his father, grandfather.…
Why can’t I get the treatment I want?” (Newman, 1996). Severely ill patients will be able to die with dignity and honor rather than waiting for their sickness to consume every part of them. Forbidding someone who is terminally ill and is suffer gives that patient a feeling of being trapped in agony and their…
Many terminally ill patients hope that their deaths be peaceful and with as much consolation as possible. Ronald Dworkin, author of Life’s Dominion, says that “many people want to save their relatives the expense of keeping them pointlessly alive…” (Dworkin 193). Terminally ill patients want to be able to keep their families and loved ones from any more suffering after their deaths due to countless and piling medical bills that they are now responsible for. This does not help these sick patients achieve any peace in these late stages of death.…
When doctors make mistakes is an article which was written by Atul Gawande. The main point why Gawande wrote his article was because he wanted to bring out the real picture of what the medical officers are doing. He wanted to expose how medicine is disturbing and strange business since it is surprising and messy. He wanted to show the public that all doctors do mistakes when undergoing their day-to-day activities but these mistakes are usually unavoidable. Through this, he was trying to bring out the consequences that follow the mistakes that the doctors commit.…
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi was a prominent neurosurgeon that had been diagnosed with cancer. Forced to face mortality, Kalanithi’s life changed completely. Initially, when he found out about his illness, he did not have the intentions to carry on with his career and life. However, with the help of his family and friends, Kalanithi decided that he wanted to pursue his life and strive. In Kalanithi’s story, family relations and the doctor-patient relationship played an important role because those relationships provided Kalanithi support throughout his illness and shaped him into an extraordinary doctor.…
As a doctor, he came to the conclusion that death not only affects the person who passed, but everyone they influenced throughout their lives. Therefore he became the person who helped people whose loved ones died understand and accept the deaths of their. He stated, “As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives- everyone dies eventually- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness… In those moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death's enemy, but as its ambassador” (Kalanithi 86-87).…
Assisted dying should be legalized. The problem of legalizing assisted dying has been long under discussion. However, people are still in two minds about it. Some of them think that euthanasia should be legalized to stop people’s agony, while others are their ardent opponents. Personally, I belong to the group of people who think that assisted dying should not be legalized for several reasons.…
The movie Wit portrays the gripping trials of a patient with terminal cancer and the ethical dilemmas health care professionals must face when treating such a disease. It follows the journey of Vivian Bearing, a middle-aged English professor who is suddenly diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. She agrees to undergo an experimental treatment conducted by Dr. Kelekian and Dr. Posner where she will receive a vigorous dosage of chemotherapy in attempt to combat the growing cancer cells. However, there are several unseen consequences to such treatment that evolve throughout the plot. The method of care and the physician-patient relationship play a vital role in communicating the problems of today’s health care system.…
Patients suffering from incurable disease have no hope of surviving. The patient clearly…