No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.

When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

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.