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I have begun reading and am almost done with a great book about a man's experience with becoming a surgeon. It is called Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande. It deals with his own feelings of nervousness in doing procedures and his thoughts and experiences with medicine in general. I, like many others I would assume, have had doubts about people entrusting me with their lives. The doctors that I see and have talked to seem so confident. This book has showed me that many others feel the same way. I will leave you with a great quote from the book.
"Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business. The stakes are high, the liberties taken tremendous. We drug people, put needles and tubes into them, manipulate their chemistry, biology, and physics, lay them unconscious and open their bodies up to the world. We do so out of an abiding confidence in our know-how as a profession. What you find when you get in close, however-close enough to see the furrowed brows, the doubts and missteps, the failures as well as the successes-is how messy, uncertain, and also surprising medicine turns out to be."
"Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business. The stakes are high, the liberties taken tremendous. We drug people, put needles and tubes into them, manipulate their chemistry, biology, and physics, lay them unconscious and open their bodies up to the world. We do so out of an abiding confidence in our know-how as a profession. What you find when you get in close, however-close enough to see the furrowed brows, the doubts and missteps, the failures as well as the successes-is how messy, uncertain, and also surprising medicine turns out to be."
The author writes about treating and listening to the whole patient, etc. Very good read for us entering medical school...
