“Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” by Atul Gawande

When I opened this book, I realized that I had read it years ago, and that it had inspired the 12-year-old me to really resist becoming a doctor. No, I was into science, I wanted everything to be clear cut and not involve messy human beings. At its heart, this is a book about how messy and imperfect we can be. There’s stories about doctor screw-ups and how they deal with the fact that we never can be certain what is going on inside another human body.

As time went on though, I came back to medicine. Because the reality of the world is that science can be just as messy as human beings are. We never really know what it is that is driving a certain mechanism in biology, this is just what all the data points to. And when the data points to something else, we change our theory. Medicine is not the only uncertain science out there, ALL of science is uncertain.

But what makes medicine unique is the profoundly human nature of it. The errors in science are errors of interpretation, we look at the data and misread it. Errors in medicine arise from miscommunications between doctors and patients, or mistaking individual differences in patients for problems relating to their illness. The process of diagnosis involves more cooperation and instinct than we’d like to believe.

Which is why books like this (or anything Gawande has written really) are so important. He peels back the veneer from medicine and shows the messy insides. Which scares us, as it did me years ago, but also reveals it as one of the most personal and human ways of understanding the world around, and within, each of us.