Atul Gawande Quotes

I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it.

There was tremendous pressure to take dialysis, and there were lots of tears when I broke the news to the family that I was not going to do it.

In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia

The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

Shortly after her feeding tube is removed, Terri Schiavo receives the Catholic ceremony of last rites. Michael Schiavo stays in a room down the hall. He remains at his wife's side throughout the day, except when her immediate family comes to see Terri.

The tragic case of Terri Schiavo in Florida highlights the importance of making our health-care wishes known.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

People make these comments all the time. They talk about this with their loved ones every day. People's feedings - tube feedings - are stopped across this country every day.

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

Death is not treatment, even if it's medically facilitated.

Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.

Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the 'slippery slope': once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.

When does life start? When does it end? Who makes these decisions?... Every day, in hospitals and homes and hospices... people are struggling with those profound issues.

Congress called a special session to debate the treatment of a woman in a persistent vegetative state on a day that 20,000 children died in the third world.

The proposed Health Care Reform bill will put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

Before operating on a patient's brain... I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.

The vast majority of the American people agree with me and many others. You don't simply repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. Republicans have had six years to come up with a replacement. They got nothing.

We got a rally a little while later - to talk to the rally because what I heard at that meeting [in Flint] - it was almost impossible for me to believe that I was listening to people in the United States of America in the year 2016.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

Health care is, at its core, about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death. Of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us unto eternity, extending it another year or month or second.