Dr. Atul Gawande says that like all of us doctors make mistakes. Gawande is the bestselling author whose book “Complications” inspired the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.” From an article in The Guardian

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications – his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy – and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.

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