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Re: Bromide
Doc... Interesting thoughts although I suppose I have a slightly different perspective on the subject. Regardless, a book I highly recommend on the subject is Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Here's an excerpt worth reading, an interview, and a speech with audio. A quote from an interview I think is worth quoting: "I think we're at a difficult juncture. On the one hand, medicine has become extraordinarily aggressive and bewildering and also powerful, in the sense that it is capable of truly extending people's lives, whether they have heart disease or kidney failure or even cancer. On the other hand, patients are being asked to make more choices and take on responsibilities of a greater magnitude than they ever have had to before. And that's because we have finally come to grips with the notion that, okay, doctors are not gods. But what comes after that? No one has really prepared anyone for this, and I think that's because we've never really shown people how medicine works: what decisions really matter, how they're made, how much uncertainty there is, how that uncertainty is dealt with. The thing that most startled me upon entering the medical profession is how human an endeavor it is. We have all the technology and studies and science and know-how and yet, in the end, it's still this tiny pair—the individual doctor and the individual patient—who are left to try to sort through it all. It's the decisions that are really critical. And those decisions are inherently imperfect because both doctor and patient are fallible, because there are still mysteries in medicine—things that we don't understand—and because there is always going to be uncertainty." - Atul Gawande There are responses to this message:
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