Complications

This book is subtitled A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. It is imminently readable, with lots of anecdotes of patients he has seen (names changed, of course). My favorite chapters were the one that dealt with the difficulty of training surgeons without compromising patient care and the one that dealt with the difficulty of patient autonomy.

What do you do when initially switching to a new type of surgery to fix a heart defect in children leads to far more deaths, but once the doctors get used to doing the surgery the result is far fewer deaths and longer life spans? Did you know that although 64 percent of Americans say they would want to pick their cancer treatment, only 12 percent of cancer patients wanted to pick their treatment?