On Betterment

An excerpt from Better, by Atul Gawande:

"Betterment is a perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only humans ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two. It is to live a life of responsibility. The question, then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well."

Atul Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He's definitely one of the respected figure in the medical and health care industry whom I look up to, and I strongly recommend this book to everyone. Someone once said, "Medicine is the only profession that labours incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence." And so it is! Many a time we take things for granted, our health being one of them, and we don't give much thought to it until we have to. Only in the absence of good health do we appreciate what we've enjoyed all along. Anyway, my point is, while I may be biased due to my personal reasons, I do think that this book is not limited to only those in the medical field. You can definitely read and understand it without knowing any jargon in medicine; but what's more is that it is related to everyone of us one way or another, because we all need medical care at some point in life. I think it's refreshing to see things from a doctor's perspective and understand what they face; at the same time you get to take a sneak peak of a slice of a surgeon's life. So yeah, if you're not too busy and would like some light read that's not your usual choice, this would be a good selection.