In its September-October 2009 issue, Harvard Magazine has a profile of Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who is best known in the public realm not for being a doctor but for being a regular contributor to The New Yorker. (He’s also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, in addition to practicing surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital…you know, a complete slacker).
As a long-time reader of The New Yorker, I almost always enjoy his essays, though I wasn’t particularly enamored of his ideas for reforming the health care system that he outlined in this New York Times op-ed during the middle of this summer’s contentious health care “debate”. The basic idea — taking best-practice successes in both care and cost-management from around the country and making them the models for every hospital — is merely a step, not a solution, and continues to rely on a foundation of letting the insurance companies run the show. Of course, it was shouted right out of consideration by the right-wing whackjobs, like every other suggestion that wasn’t “Do NOTHING!!”, so I guess at this juncture it doesn’t matter.
The profile is pretty standard, but it does give you a picture of this man that you might not get from his own writing, plus a bunch of links to related articles and other interesting items about Dr. Gawande.
Oh, okay… just to make you feel better, here’s a gratuitous New Yorker cartoon:
