You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.