Atul Gawande on America’s urgent need to rethink end-of-life care | Dallas Morning News

Atul Gawande, author of the superb Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End:

"I learned about a lot of things in medical school; dying was not one of them. I went into surgery because I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save the day. I learned how to fix things — but not how to manage the problems that you could not fix. I didn’t expect that to be as much of my career as it is."

...

"There was a core set of things that people put out to me. Number one, people have priorities in their lives besides just living longer and they matter a great deal. Number two is that the most reliable way to learn what those priorities are is to ask and we don’t ask. The result, that’s number three, is that when you don’t ask, the care and treatment that people get is often increasingly out of alignment with their priorities and what really matters most to them."

Q&A: Atul Gawande on America’s urgent need to rethink end-of-life care | Dallas Morning News