Thursday, November 3, 2016

Knowledge and Wisdom: an unexpected outcome

It is very difficult to separate knowledge and wisdom, for wisdom is an extension of knowledge. Without knowledge, you could not have wisdom, but wisdom is more than just knowing. Wisdom is developped by experience.  
In the beginning of Being Mortal, Gawanda makes many observations and introduces many facts about his experiences with death and dying, and the lack of coverage during medical school. He says "the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise." The latter half of the book focuses on palliative care and less medical things. Instead of trying to fix something that cannot be fixed with medicine, Gawanda shines light on how we can make life better at the end of life. He reaches the conclusion, "Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be."

My personal favorite quote from this book is "I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor—and, really, as a human being—would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can. But it’s proved true, whether with a patient like Jewel Douglass, a friend like Peg Bachelder, or someone I loved as much as my father." This quote explains in a simple paragraph how Gawanda's thinking changed from the beginning of his career as a doctor to the end.

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