Complications by Atul Gawande

Surgeons and Doctors often seem like Gods. When someone is wheeled into to the ER with injuries like gunshot wounds, knife slashes or other insults to the body, Surgeons are there to patch you up, heal your body, and save your life. They can sew up your wounds, take out your diseased parts and help you to heal afterwards.

But Gods? No, they aren't gods. Sometimes their patients who should have recovered die, and some who should die recover, with or without the surgeon's help. And the reasons for this are many and varied- but most boil down to the fact that surgery may be a science, but it is an imperfect science. practiced by imperfect people. In fact, the whole of medicine is an imperfect science, one that we may never master, since each person is different. Sometimes, different medications are needed for people suffering the same disease. Why? We may never know.

This book is full of stories of stumped doctors, stumped patients, and true life stories- about how Friday the Thirteenth is always busy in a hospital, and about his own tale of working a Friday the 13th on a full moon with a lunar eclipse while in residency. A story of a pregnant woman stricken with persistent, almost unbearable nausea, which went away as soon as she gave birth, and even takes us to the operating room floor to show how surgical complications happen- and can happen to everyone. He shows how some hospitals overcome this by specializing in one surgery, and how anesthesiology has changed... one hopes for the better.

He even takes us to the Annual surgeon's convention, and shows us what goes on inside, both on the convention floor and in the discussion halls, and how surgeons deal with it when things go wrong. You may assume that malpractice suits keep surgeons careful and weed out the really bad surgeons, but the truth is that many patients who had something go wrong in surgery never file for malpractice- and many malpractice suits are based around things which are not the fault of the surgeon or surgical team.

This book provides a fascinating look at the life of a surgeon in residency, and features stories from surgeons and patients showing what surgery is really like, and how most of the job is training, training, training so that you can do a procedure without it going wrong, and know what to do if and when it does. Residency is the seasoning process, where surgeons learn to do things correctly that they may have only observed before, and is necessary for them to become the surgeons they want to be.

It also shows the limitations of medicine. Surgeons and Doctors aren't always successful, and sometimes the treatments that seem to work for everyone else just don't work for some people. Why? Again, no one really knows, just that everyone is slightly different, and different treatments work in different ways.

I found this book both interesting and fascinating to read, and I enjoyed the true stories within very much. Some end well and some end badly, but all of them illuminate both medicine, and the people who practice it, and how sometimes they are powerless and helpless to prevent people from dying. I recommend this book, but warn that some of it may end up making you a little queasy if you are prone to such feelings.