Parcho, MD

I’ve never read a single thing that Dr. Atul Gawande has written–and he’s written plenty. His resume includes two books, 30 columns for Slate, and numerous articles for the New Yorker. He’s also a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Harvard Medical School. Of course, he is a surgeon–so that’s at least one strike against him. But I digress.

The New York Times has a nice profile of Dr. Gawande this week which conveniently coincides with the release of his second book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Perfomance. It is an interesting read and gives pretty good insight to the life of such an accomplished and respected surgeon.

It’s the final paragraph, though, that makes me wonder if I’ve missed out on something by never reading Dr. Gawande’s work:

Pulling out his Blackberry, he said, “It seems like there’s a story in every nook and cranny of medicine,” and scrolling down a list of 106 ideas he’d saved, he picked a few. “Itching,” he said. “Nobody really understands what it is. Chernobyl. Twenty years on, what really happened there? Why weren’t there as many cancer cases as we predicted? And here’s a good one: why, if we have so many health-policy experts in this country, do we have such bad health policy?”

Maybe I’ll go and pick up his next book.