Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
We did little better than Ivan Ilyich’s primitive nineteenth-century doctors—worse, actually, given the new forms of physical torture we’d inflicted on our patient. It is enough to make you wonder, who are the primitive ones.
Excerpt From Being Mortal Atul Gawande
A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology
David Epstein • Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
transgression
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail.
Atul Gawande • The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
This is why I insist my patients undergo a DEXA scan annually—and I am far more interested in their visceral fat than their total body fat.
Peter Attia MD • Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
This simple but profound service—to grasp a fading man’s need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims—is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking
Atul Gawande • Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande, an American surgeon and journalist, offers a metaphor for the shortfalls of such piecemeal approaches to change, “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence.”
Elizabeth Bradley • The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Us Less
When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Those who escaped the clutches of infectious disease, injury or bad luck were greeted by an inexplicable state of decline which we’d now recognize as aging: a gradual loss of faculties in a world where fitness, keen senses and mental acuity could be the difference between eating and being eaten.