Medicine is not a perfect science. Nothing is a perfect science ever. Humans are naturally very prone to mistakes, errors, miscalculations, and bad assumptions. When a human does something, the best it can be is perfectly human, but never perfect. When that principle applies to medicine though, the concequences become extreme. Atul Gwande's book "The Checklist Manifesto" writes about the inability of people in any profession to ever achieve everything they know how to do. This sounds backwards, "If you know how to do it, just do it and you'll achieve it", but it is not that easy. Considering the more complex a task required, the greater opportunity for failure in completing it successfully and the more harsh the failure becomes. This is esspecially true in the medical field when tens of people: doctors, nurses, aenestaticians, critical care personel, etc., have to all perform their tasks in harmony to treat horrible patients with a one in a million chances of survival. If anything anywhere along the line goes wrong, and it will, the room for improvision has to be there, but small enough for the treatment to have a true and certain path from A, diagnosis, to B, cure.
Recent comments