The New Yorker's website has posted Atul Gawande's recent commencement address to the graduates of Stanford Medical School. In his talk he describes great medicine as "work with a different set of values from the ones that medicine traditionally has had: values of teamwork instead of individual autonomy, ambition for the right process rather than the right technology, and, perhaps above all, humility—for we need the humility to recognize that, under conditions of complexity, no technology will be infallible. No individual will be, either." It seems to me that this encapsulates the essence of our daily work in healthcare epidemiology.
Friday, June 18, 2010
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Ezra Klein excerpted a different section and titled it 13,600 diagnoses. The comments are interesting.
ReplyDeletehttp://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/13600_diagnoses_bob_13600.html