Atul Gawande on the Velluvial Matrix

Please read Atul Gawande’s fabulous commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Here he talks about information overload – the amount of new information every doctor, professional, human being needs to be on top of – and the need to therefore specialize. And the pitfalls of super-specialization.

Towards the end, he says, ‘And when you are a doctor or a medical scientist this is the work you want to do. It is work with a different set of values from the ones that medicine traditionally has had: values of teamwork instead of individual autonomy, ambition for the right process rather than the right technology, and, perhaps above all, humility—for we need the humility to recognize that, under conditions of complexity, no technology will be infallible. No individual will be, either’.

Me, I have been on the receiving end of what I call medical myopia for several years now in my struggle with fibromyalgia – first the diagnosis, or even getting doctors to acknowledge that there is indeed a problem, and then the treatment. I long for that day when I see Indian doctors work this way – with a sense of teamwork, notion of care for the patient and above all, with humility.