Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside
with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized
form but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human." Atul Gawande offers an unflinching
view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions
must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur
and why good surgeons go bad. He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect
with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away;
a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. And in a richly detailed portrait
of both the people and the science, Gawande also ponders the human factor that makes saving lives possible.