I'm asking all of the students in the best sellers class to create blogs to share their responses to their advice/ self-help books. I'll do the same about The Checklist Manifesto.
My first impression is that Gawande uses an accessible writing style. Yea! I was able to grasp what I think is the main idea of the book, as he describes it in the introductory chapter. Gawande writes of a shift in the big problem confronting the medical profession today as opposed to that of the medical profession of, say, fifty years ago. Doctors used to face the problem of ignorance; they didn't know what was wrong with their patients and didn't know what to do for them. Now, however, the problem is ineptitude; there is--and really it's amazing-- a wealth of knowledge about over 13,000 identifible diseases, syndromes and injuries. Doctors have approximately 6,000 medications and 4,000 medical and surgical procedures from which to choose in planning for their patients' treatment. The problem now is how to get it right. Doctors have to manage the complexity of what they have come to know.
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Having a variety of specialists that understand different areas in medicine definitely help minimize the complexity. Doctors have to know their stuff but the specialists are the ones that understand everything about the subject (there are all sorts of specialists). Also more diseases have been developed over the years, so there are still a decent amount of untreatable diseases. HIV/AIDS treatment has improved but is still considered untreatable.
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