The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.

These are folks that keep people out of hospitals, out of emergency rooms, out of nursing homes. And not only that, they help people achieve more fulfilling lives.

When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.

In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.

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.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.