Atul Gawande’s essay “When Doctors Make Mistakes” is a great writing to show the realities of medicine and how it is mostly misunderstood. Gawande gets the credibility for writing this essay but Atul has plenty of stories from other doctors that worked in the hospital and their stories along with mistakes they made. He was also trusted by other surgeons to handle the patients who came in through the emergency room. This essay has plenty of different emotions into it from the different stories about things that went wrong during surgeries.
The reasoning of this essay is again to show the realities of medicine and how it is mostly misunderstood. Atul Gawande’s essay “When Doctors Make Mistakes” not only shows the realities of medicine but it also shows that everybody makes mistakes whether it is good or bad, doctors make mistakes at least once a year. In “When Doctors Make Mistakes” Atul Gawande describes his experience as the surgical resident on duty for emergencies at a hospital when a car crash victim was brought in. He attempted to intubate the patient and each time was unsuccessful.
Dr. Michael Ball was a surgeon that worked in the hospital and when he stepped in he managed to slip a tube through the vocal cords and get oxygen to the heart. Atul Gawande was ashamed but he knew that mistakes like his are made every year by capable and respected physicians, not just negligent doctors. In the essay Atul Gawande writes “There are surgeons who will see faults everywhere expect Borah 2 themselves” (Gawande 599). Gawande then goes on with a quote from a surgeon that said “If you’re not a little afraid when you operate, you’re bound to do a patient a grave disservice”.
(Gawande 599) Atul also wrote in his essay about how every Tuesday morning the surgeon’s, interns, the chairman of surgery and medical students who were doing their surgery rotation would be at this meeting. During this meeting they would talk about some of the surgery’s that happened during week and any problems that went wrong. The surgeon/doctor that was on the case could be asked questions about what happened and helped everybody reflect on the cases. When the patient from the car crash accident come into the emergency room, Atul was assisting Dr.
Michael Ball on another surgery but one of them had to step away to take care of this patient. Dr. Michael Ball sent Atul down to the emergency room to see what was going on. He trusted and believed in him enough for him to be on his own with the patient. Surgeons need to be able to count on each other. Even though Atul couldn’t successfully intubate the patient, Dr. Michael Ball came in at the right time to help him. But what if he didn’t make it in time and Atul lost the patient, he would have had to believe that he did everything he could to save that patients life.
Atul Gawande wrote this essay about his experiences at the hospital, what he saw and the stories he heard. A lot of emotion went into this essay and being able to open up and let the outside world have a little understanding of what goes in behind the hospital doors. “A general surgeon left a large mental instrument in a patient’s abdomen, where it tore through the bowel and the wall of the bladder. In another, a cancer surgeon biopsied the wrong part of a women’s breast and thereby delayed her diagnosis of cancer for months.
A cardiac surgeon skipped a small by key step during a heart-valve operation, thereby killing the patient. A surgeon saw a man racked with abdominal pain in the emergency room and without Borah 3 taking a CT scan, assumed that the man had a kidney stone; eighteen hours later, a scan showed a reputing abdominal aortic aneurysm, and the patient died not to long afterwards. ” Being a doctor or a surgeon can be very emotional, but making mistakes can make it even harder. As a doctor admitting to mistakes that are made is the only way somebody can become a better person and a better doctor.
This has been said multiple times medicine is misunderstood and that is a lot more than long education to become a doctor. A comment that was made in this essay was “The doctor is often the final actor in a chain of events that can either set him/her up to fail. It’s the process, not the individuals in it, which requires closer examination and corrections” (Gawande 601).
A doctor needs to understand every part of medicine, and the logic behind it. The logic behind a surgery, the logic behind a patient’s recovery. “When Doctors Make Mistakes” shows emotion, creditability, and reasoning, but it shows what happens behind the doors of a surgery room, or even a hospital. Doctors are human just like everybody else, but they have a greater risk of losing a life than anybody else. Everybody makes mistakes, but the importance is learning from that mistake or not. Essays have a purpose, and the purpose of this essay is show simply express that mistakes happen every day.
Atul stated “The way that things go wrong in medicine is normally unseen and, consequently, often misunderstood. Mistakes do happen. We think o them as aberrant; they are anything but” (Gawande 590). Borah 4 Atul Gawande. “When Doctors Make Mistakes. ” The Norton Reader. 13th ed. Linda Person, et al. , Eds. New York: Norton, 2012 591-608.