Sir Gawande Summary

Gawande uses examples from his own experiences to explain how medical professionals can be competent and more than competent. He describes that medical practitioners are competent when they are knowledgeable about diseases and when they can perform medical procedures. In the excerpt, Gawande demonstrated his competence by showing his ability to follow another internist’s instructions and by performing appropriate procedures for a “seventy-something-year-old Portuguese woman had been admitted because…she didn’t feel too good.” Gawande had not noticed that her condition was particularly strange. His senior internist, on the other hand, displayed what it meant to be more than competent. Unlike Gawande, his senior internist took the initiative to check on the patient on his own because he noticed that her condition was abnormal. The
On the first case history text, I showed that I was good at stating the specifics about the patient’s diabetes. However, I did not do a good job of chronologically describing her condition. I wrote that “a female 11-year-old Patient C came in today accompanied by her mother to review her Type 1 Diabetes conditions.” This was not effective in describing her condition because “today” is misleading. “Today” implies that the patient is reviewing her conditions on the day any medical practitioner reads it, which is not true. In this situation, I should have omitted “today” and simply stated that the patient reviewed her Type 1 Diabetes. On the second case history text, I did a better job at explaining the purpose of the case history. I wrote, “this 50-year-old, female patient has recovered from right-eye retinal detachment.” I stated the patient’s condition without referring to when I wrote the case history. From learning about the mistake in my first case history, I was able to improve on the second case