Thanks as ever for your fine blog posts. Have a lovely weekend!
aloha, sms
Friday, November 4, 2016
Knowledge vs. Wisdom
Rochelle Coloma
HON 101
Blog Post #10
For many people, the words knowledge and wisdom are often
regarded as being synonymous, when in truth, they have two entirely different
meanings. Growing up, I often associated knowledge as something that is gained
through education whereas for wisdom, I believed it required patience and countless
experiences. However, knowledge is
merely the ability to acquire information or have a complete understanding of
for instance, a specific topic or event. Wisdom is based on our experiences and
the skill to make good judgments and choices. The connection between the two is
that wisdom is reinforced through knowledge.
Throughout the book, Being
Mortal, Atul Gawande illustrated the idea that medicine was the immediate
answer for every patient. His vast knowledge allowed him to inform his patients
of the different treatments they can undergo to better their health. However,
he lacked the wisdom on how to approach patients on the topic of death and the
possibilities that it could happen. As the book progresses, he encountered
multiple terminally ill patients and his understanding of death and the ending
stages of life started to deepen. He also talked heavily about his own
father’s experience with cancer and the effect it had on his family. After the
first surgery, his father decided to not undergo any more treatments and
eventually ended up in hospice care. A meeting with a hospice nurse gave him
the opportunity to clearly understand what his father’s wishes and goals were before
his death. Due to this event, I believe his outlook on death started to change
and accept that his father’s death was inevitable.
To end, Gawande was
able to learn that the overall care for a patient is not only limited to
medications and treatments. It takes the right wisdom that is gained through
experiences to solidify good judgment for the betterment of a patient.
Knowledge vs. Wisdom
Hunter Garrett
Post #10
The difference between knowledge and wisdom is that knowledge is simply the facts, information, and statistics that is acquired from studying. It is purely memory based and is something that one can learn quite rapidly. However, wisdom is the ability to use moral judgement to generate decisions based on acquired knowledge. It is the application of knowledge to produce the correct decisions from a particular situation. Wisdom is something that takes a long time to acquire though, given that it is something that can only be acquired from experience.
Atul Gawande transitions to the path of wisdom throughout his intellectual memoir Being Mortal as he learns about terminally ill patients and begins to see the errors in the mentality of the medical system. He admits to originally being more like "doctor informative" like most doctors in which they purely use their knowledge to address medical problems such as cancer. These doctors typically lay out the brutal facts and the available treatment options in which the patient would then have the ability to chose whichever one appealed to them. They have no consideration at all for the patient's priorities, interests in how they want to live, and typically don't mention not accepting treatment as an option. Informative doctors do not question their patient to figure out the treatment option that falls in line with how they could enjoy the rest of their lives. This is due to the fact that doctors treat patients as if they are objects that need to be fixed. The mentality for medicine is that everything can be treated and potentially cured. Doctors are also intimidated from not doing enough since there is always treatments available for everything including the incurable illnesses, despite some being completely ineffective. They are essentially obligated to help extend the patients life in any possible way that they can, with suffering being traded in for more time staying alive. However, Gawande realizes that that doctors are using medicine to approach the situation of dying improperly.
Gawande came to the realization that wisdom must be utilized in the treatment of terminally ill patients in order for them live the rest of their lives happily. He learns this through his interactions with multiple terminally ill patients, and his father when he develops cancer through a tumor growing in his upper spinal cord in his neck. Based off of what Gawande learned with talking to terminally ill patients, he learned that treatment was not always the best option in preserving one's happiness in life. He learned how to ask questions that addressed the patients priorities and interests in life, and learned how to have "difficult conversations" to make end of life decisions easier for the patient and the family. Gawande had a "difficult conversation" with his father early after his diagnosis in which he asked his father what he was willing to sacrifice and what he wanted his quality of life to be. When it came time to make treatment decisions, he and his father were prepared for them and had a clear state of mind on how he intended to live which meant them choosing to put off treatment as long as possible. He applied his wisdom to his father which ultimately resulted in him enjoying the rest of life for an extended period of time. It was clear that his father was more concerned about what he would lose from the operation than what he would lose from the tumor. This allowed his father to enjoy playing tennis again, carry out his rotary club responsibilities, and continue his work on expanding his college. It became apparent that Gawande's wisdom resulted in almost every choice for his father being the right choice. However, when his father was recommended to undergo radiation therapy after his operation to eradicate the tumor given how immense the benefits were expected to be, Gawande urged him to do the treatment. This turned into a huge mistake soon after in which it only made his father's life miserable as he had no benefit from it at all, the tumor soon grew rapidly in size, and he even unexpectedly and permanently lost his sense of taste. Afterwards, Gawande's father decided to not undergo any further treatment to avoid any risks of worsening his life further. He wanted to make the most of what remained of his life in the present and just wanted to live happily at home with his family in hospice care with no suffering, pain, resuscitation, or life support. Again, it seemed that not accepting treatment was the proper decision given how his father was able to enjoy the final months of his life until his very death. His father didn't want to be a useless burden on the family living in the hospital living on machines and life support. Gawande knew from his experience that not accepting treatment could very well be the best treatment available to make someone enjoy the most out of their life. His father and the terminally ill patients he met proved that avoiding treatment with a good quality of life and less time was better than accepting treatment for extra time through progressively more suffering and little to no happiness.
Gawande realized that approaching end of life decisions properly involved a great deal of wisdom in order to get a patient to live out the rest of their life well. Knowledge alone is not enough to make the right decision, and the quality of life is more important than the amount of time one has to live. Doctors need to understand what a patient desires and what they are willing to go through in order to select a treatment that will be in line with how they want to live. He realized that it is important for patients to have a purpose in life and to be in control of how they want to live rather than just simply "being alive." Medicine itself has been using knowledge for treatment, but has been neglecting care through wisdom. The flaw is that medicine focuses only on extending the amount of time that one has as long as possible rather than focusing the quality of the life itself.
Post #10
The difference between knowledge and wisdom is that knowledge is simply the facts, information, and statistics that is acquired from studying. It is purely memory based and is something that one can learn quite rapidly. However, wisdom is the ability to use moral judgement to generate decisions based on acquired knowledge. It is the application of knowledge to produce the correct decisions from a particular situation. Wisdom is something that takes a long time to acquire though, given that it is something that can only be acquired from experience.
Atul Gawande transitions to the path of wisdom throughout his intellectual memoir Being Mortal as he learns about terminally ill patients and begins to see the errors in the mentality of the medical system. He admits to originally being more like "doctor informative" like most doctors in which they purely use their knowledge to address medical problems such as cancer. These doctors typically lay out the brutal facts and the available treatment options in which the patient would then have the ability to chose whichever one appealed to them. They have no consideration at all for the patient's priorities, interests in how they want to live, and typically don't mention not accepting treatment as an option. Informative doctors do not question their patient to figure out the treatment option that falls in line with how they could enjoy the rest of their lives. This is due to the fact that doctors treat patients as if they are objects that need to be fixed. The mentality for medicine is that everything can be treated and potentially cured. Doctors are also intimidated from not doing enough since there is always treatments available for everything including the incurable illnesses, despite some being completely ineffective. They are essentially obligated to help extend the patients life in any possible way that they can, with suffering being traded in for more time staying alive. However, Gawande realizes that that doctors are using medicine to approach the situation of dying improperly.
Gawande came to the realization that wisdom must be utilized in the treatment of terminally ill patients in order for them live the rest of their lives happily. He learns this through his interactions with multiple terminally ill patients, and his father when he develops cancer through a tumor growing in his upper spinal cord in his neck. Based off of what Gawande learned with talking to terminally ill patients, he learned that treatment was not always the best option in preserving one's happiness in life. He learned how to ask questions that addressed the patients priorities and interests in life, and learned how to have "difficult conversations" to make end of life decisions easier for the patient and the family. Gawande had a "difficult conversation" with his father early after his diagnosis in which he asked his father what he was willing to sacrifice and what he wanted his quality of life to be. When it came time to make treatment decisions, he and his father were prepared for them and had a clear state of mind on how he intended to live which meant them choosing to put off treatment as long as possible. He applied his wisdom to his father which ultimately resulted in him enjoying the rest of life for an extended period of time. It was clear that his father was more concerned about what he would lose from the operation than what he would lose from the tumor. This allowed his father to enjoy playing tennis again, carry out his rotary club responsibilities, and continue his work on expanding his college. It became apparent that Gawande's wisdom resulted in almost every choice for his father being the right choice. However, when his father was recommended to undergo radiation therapy after his operation to eradicate the tumor given how immense the benefits were expected to be, Gawande urged him to do the treatment. This turned into a huge mistake soon after in which it only made his father's life miserable as he had no benefit from it at all, the tumor soon grew rapidly in size, and he even unexpectedly and permanently lost his sense of taste. Afterwards, Gawande's father decided to not undergo any further treatment to avoid any risks of worsening his life further. He wanted to make the most of what remained of his life in the present and just wanted to live happily at home with his family in hospice care with no suffering, pain, resuscitation, or life support. Again, it seemed that not accepting treatment was the proper decision given how his father was able to enjoy the final months of his life until his very death. His father didn't want to be a useless burden on the family living in the hospital living on machines and life support. Gawande knew from his experience that not accepting treatment could very well be the best treatment available to make someone enjoy the most out of their life. His father and the terminally ill patients he met proved that avoiding treatment with a good quality of life and less time was better than accepting treatment for extra time through progressively more suffering and little to no happiness.
Gawande realized that approaching end of life decisions properly involved a great deal of wisdom in order to get a patient to live out the rest of their life well. Knowledge alone is not enough to make the right decision, and the quality of life is more important than the amount of time one has to live. Doctors need to understand what a patient desires and what they are willing to go through in order to select a treatment that will be in line with how they want to live. He realized that it is important for patients to have a purpose in life and to be in control of how they want to live rather than just simply "being alive." Medicine itself has been using knowledge for treatment, but has been neglecting care through wisdom. The flaw is that medicine focuses only on extending the amount of time that one has as long as possible rather than focusing the quality of the life itself.
Blog post 10_knowledge and wisdom
Wisdom vs. knowledge.
Although knowledge and wisdom are not the same, I feel these words are often linked. Knowledge is the available facts and information that are out in the world. Wisdom is what comes from within; it is the ability to make better decisions based on archived knowledge. Knowledge improves as we seek for an improvement and we take our time to shape our wisdom when decision making. In simple way of understanding, Wisdom is an application of knowledge.
In the book Being Mortal, Atul Gawanda shares his medical knowledge of being a surgeon and how the patients, especially his father's end of life decisions shaped his wisdom. A quote from the last chapter "courage" of the book, Gawanda puts his insight about knowledge and wisdom in the following sentence. “Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.”
"Medicine and what matters in the end" as the subtitle of the book, I feel this speaks a lot about Gawanda's journey of finding the wisdom which comes from within him from all the required knowledge from the medical school of becoming a surgeon doctor. At the beginning of the book, Gawanda points out life's two big unfixable; aging and dying. People living in the modern era have let new science and technology decided the fate of end of life choices and what medicine can fix. We have been lacking to see and focus on the aging, dying and end of life decisions without medicines. Throughout the research and memoir of Gawanda, he slowly guides us to see what is really important in life. He shifted the focus of the knowledge to a wisdom based on what he experience dealing with father's death and end of life choices.
Although knowledge and wisdom are not the same, I feel these words are often linked. Knowledge is the available facts and information that are out in the world. Wisdom is what comes from within; it is the ability to make better decisions based on archived knowledge. Knowledge improves as we seek for an improvement and we take our time to shape our wisdom when decision making. In simple way of understanding, Wisdom is an application of knowledge.
In the book Being Mortal, Atul Gawanda shares his medical knowledge of being a surgeon and how the patients, especially his father's end of life decisions shaped his wisdom. A quote from the last chapter "courage" of the book, Gawanda puts his insight about knowledge and wisdom in the following sentence. “Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.”
"Medicine and what matters in the end" as the subtitle of the book, I feel this speaks a lot about Gawanda's journey of finding the wisdom which comes from within him from all the required knowledge from the medical school of becoming a surgeon doctor. At the beginning of the book, Gawanda points out life's two big unfixable; aging and dying. People living in the modern era have let new science and technology decided the fate of end of life choices and what medicine can fix. We have been lacking to see and focus on the aging, dying and end of life decisions without medicines. Throughout the research and memoir of Gawanda, he slowly guides us to see what is really important in life. He shifted the focus of the knowledge to a wisdom based on what he experience dealing with father's death and end of life choices.
Atul Gawande: Expert with Knowledge and Wisdom- Brian Nguyen
Being a surgeon and bestselling
author, there is no doubt that Atul Gawande is intelligent. When he discusses
complex medical terms and statistics, he does so with ease and detail. This
logos proves his extensive knowledge he possessed in order to write this
nonfiction. His research into the history of elderly care is comprehensive as
when he provides the histories of assisted living and hospice. Gawande weaves
this information into his memoir masterfully by telling the reader only
pertinent facts to the book. The reality is that this is a story foremost and
not a dry scientific journal. Gawande knows his audience are mostly not doctors
that can understand the complicated jargon of medical professionals. Knowing this,
he relies on wisdom and anecdotes to drive his message that the elderly care
system needs to be reformed.
Wisdom is different from knowledge
in the regard that wisdom is learned from experience. There are lessons and
teachings that an old uneducated man knows over a child genius. In Gawande’s
case, he writes of the wisdom of people who have been affected by an elder
close to the end of their life. Although his father’s end of life played a
critical role in the climax of this nonfiction, Gawande harks on the wisdom of
others to relay the overarching theme of his book. Some examples that come to my
mind is Dr. Bill Thomas and Karen Brown Wilson. Even though their methods were
completely different, they were able to improve the medical care system in
their own unique ways. By describing others in this story, Gawande makes his
argument stronger and more reliable. Overall, there is an expert blend of both
knowledge and wisdom in this nonfiction drawing in all readers whether it is a
college freshman or a grandparent struggling in the end of their life.
Knowledge Vs. Wisdom
Michael Dang
Hon101
Post #10
Hon101
Post #10
Knowledge is the accumulations of facts and information that is gained from studying and experience. It can be obtained from a classroom and learning institution. On the other hand, wisdom is the ability to discern and judge which aspects of knowledge are true, right, and applicable towards life. It helps give a deeper understanding of how to live by providing meaning from knowledge.
Through the many occurrences and events that happen during the book, I think Gawanda moves from knowledge to wisdom as he sees flaws in the medical system. He observes that doctors are knowledgable to cancer and claim they know how to treat it, but they don’t know how to factor in a person’s interest and how that person wants to live their life. Usually, many doctors just list a number of possible treatments and ask the patient which one they would like. But these doctors don’t consider how the patient could end up happy through this process. They don’t go over which treatment plan could lead to the best possible life for a patient. As Gawanda stated, sometimes doctors are afraid of doing nothing. They always think that some form of surgery or medication is needed, and that it’s their responsibility to act in whatever way they can. This leads to them prescribing any experimental treatments that aren’t proved to be effective. But Gawanda soon finds out that this is the wrong way to approach the situation.
In the world of cancer and terminal illnesses, Gawanda discovers that wisdom needs to be heavily utilized in the process of treatment. The ultimate life changing moment for him is when he discovers that his father has cancer. Luckily enough, Gawanda and his family seem to make almost all the right decisions concerning his father’s condition. His father refused early surgery upon his spine, allowing him to enjoys many months where he was able to play tennis, work on his service projects, and help improve his college. His father valued being functional and having a purpose to live, and he seemed happy. But eventually, the doctors recommended radiation therapy for preventive treatment. This turned out to be a terrible decision as his father had burn marks and severe irritation. It was as if the treatment itself made his father’s condition worse. So in the end, Gawanda’s father decided to withdraw from any surgery or treatment. He just wanted to live a happier life with his family at home and eventually in hospice care as well. This seemed to be the right decision as his father seemed to really enjoy his last few months. It was certainly better than being in the ICU and breathing through a tube. Even for some of Gawanda’s patients such as Sara and Douglass, doing nothing like Gawanda’s father seemed better compared to unhappily suffering through treatment.
Gawanda learned that wisdom is key in deciding how to treat patients. It’s important to be able to understand what a terminally ill patient is going through and how they can still have purpose in their life. Patients still need to be the author of their own life.
Knowledge vs. Wisdom
Blessie Vergara
Post #10
Google gives these following definitions for knowledge and wisdom: Knowledge is defined as “facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.” Wisdom is defined as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” Gawanda intermingles both together in his book, “Being Mortal.”
We read a lot of memoirs in this course, and “Being Mortal” is unique in that other people’s life experiences are used as context to the point being made, rather than the author’s own life experience. From directly and indirectly witnessing these experiences, Gawanda learns things of his own. For example, seeing terminal patients made Gawande realize that providing end-of-life care is learning how to “build a health care system that will help people achieve that’s most important to them at the end of their lives (pg. 155).” This is an example of wisdom--this lesson was not something that was not learned in school or from a textbook. Earlier in the book, Gawanda cited multiple research studies on the times when people became conscious of life’s fragility. He summarized these findings, saying that “people’s goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely” when put in a life-changing situation, not necessarily when they reach the end of their lives. This is an example of knowledge--despite being summarized in his own words, the point that he makes was derived from multiple research studies.
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