Complications
A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
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Narrated by:
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William David Griffith
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By:
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Atul Gawande
About this listen
Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur, why good surgeons go bad. He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande also ponders the human factor that makes saving lives possible.
At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.
©2002 Atul Gawande (P)2003 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
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At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
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Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
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Birth Day
- A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth
- By: Mark Sloan MD
- Narrated by: Mark Sloan MD
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned 24 and starting my third year of medical school." So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly 3000 births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas.
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Great Book - Heavy on the History
- By Robert Ingalls on 03-16-17
By: Mark Sloan MD
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Shocked
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- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
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Not too long ago, there was no coming back from death. But now, with revolutionary medical advances, death has become just another serious complication. As a young medical student, Dr. David Casarett was inspired by the story of a two-year-old girl named Michelle Funk. Michelle fell into a creek and was underwater for over an hour. When she was found she wasn't breathing, and her pupils were fixed and dilated. That drowning should have been fatal. But after three hours of persistent work, a team of doctors and nurses was able to bring her back.
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Dead vs. Sincerely Dead
- By Gillian on 06-24-16
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The Undead
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Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.
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Eye opening
- By Amy Giglio on 07-01-18
By: Dick Teresi
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Rise and Shine
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Story
Crushed between a truck and a tree, Simon and his wife were both pronounced dead at the scene of a horrific car accident. Enduring a broken skull, jaw, arms, clavicle and pelvis, followed by a coma, Simon lives to tell his remarkable journey from tragedy to triumph.
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Amazing opportunities for healing!
- By Leah on 04-29-17
By: Simon Lewis
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God's Hotel
- A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
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- Narrated by: Victoria Sweet
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- Unabridged
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San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.
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Great read
- By kayla solomon on 04-08-17
By: Victoria Sweet
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In Shock
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In Shock is a riveting first-hand account from a young critical care physician, who in the passage of a moment is transfigured into a dying patient. This transposition, coincidentally timed at the end of her medical training, instantly lays bare the vast chasm between the conventional practice of medicine and the stark reality of the prostrate patient.
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Read this book!
- By CT on 11-08-17
By: Dr. Rana Awdish
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King of Hearts
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- Narrated by: Patrick Cullen
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Story
G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.
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Loved every minute
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Do No Harm
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Overall
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With compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again.
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Uneven
- By Scott on 06-02-15
By: Henry Marsh
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What listeners say about Complications
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-14-18
good book buy
The guy skipped like 3 chapters which was really frustrating & on top of not reading some chapters the one he did read ? some paragraphs got skipped it got really annoying ; overall i liked the book
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1 person found this helpful
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- Oliver
- 03-02-12
Good reflections, thoughtful
Would you consider the audio edition of Complications to be better than the print version?
Haven't read print version.
Any additional comments?
This was a thoughtful book about risk, patient choice, and the practice of medicine. I found both the first and last 3rds of the book very good, while there was a section in the middle that was less interesting for me. Overall a v. good listen.
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- Micah
- 11-09-11
Intriguing
A very insightful view from the perspective of a surgeon. The real-life stories were interesting, and he makes some good points about inherent problems in the medical field.
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- Frost
- 03-10-19
Well told story, a must read!
Complications is a story for anyone who works with doctors or had regular dealings with them. Gawande weaves story is together to create a picture of doctors that is interesting as it proves that they are only human. I will be listening to it again.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-03-17
Good read!
The content is great and the reading was good too. The only thing that bothered me was the music at the beginning and end of each chapter. It was distracting and didn't add anything to the reading.
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- Devin Aethnen
- 05-19-22
Great book, terrible random elevator music
Who on Earth thinks it's a good idea to insert random snippets of elevator / hold music throughout an audiobook?! Otherwise a great book with entertaining anecdotes.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-07-23
Absorbing read
The personable stories are gold for anyone and everyone. Especially students in or planning to enter medicine, the details are so exciting.
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Overall
- Z
- 04-16-06
Outstanding
This is a fantastic book. It will be enjoyable for anyone with some interest in medicine, and most likely will be thoroughly enjoyed even by those with no interest in medicine.
It's not really heavily focussed on technical aspects of medicine, though there is some detail about medical procedures but it's generally just part of setting the scene of the story.
The book is mainly a collection of stories with a common theme - that doctors are human and sometimes make mistakes. There are some stories about negligent doctors, but primarily it's about good doctors who aren't always right. There is a kind of running ethical dilemma about the balance between training and giving practice to new doctors and giving patients the best care.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- LMN
- 05-10-04
Full of insight
Wonderful! If you are familiar with science and the uncertainties of real life research (and practice) as opposed to the text book models of "scientific process", this book won't come as a shock. It is a brilliant exploration of the uncertainties in the science of medicine and the impact that human beings, with their frailties and their brilliant insights, have on a medicine. While I must admit it leaves me somewhat more nervous about major medical procedures, if more people understood medicine as presented here, we would probably not be plagued with so many law suits, the resultant high malpractice insurance fees and the final result of high cost health care. At the same time, if some of the insights presented in this book were translated into new systems and practices in the medical field, we probably would also not have so much human error to begin with. A great listen I recommend highly.
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2 people found this helpful
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- chloe
- 11-14-16
Riveting
An awesome book; stories very interesting; great insight into the medical world. look forward to reading more of Gawande's work
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