Being Mortal Atul Gawande Analysis

In the documentary of “Being Mortal”, surgeon Atul Gawande speaks about how being a doctor is one of the hardest things. For this reason, it is based off of what he mentioned “that in doctoring school they only teach you a small percent of what you actually need to know”. By this he was saying that the schools teach students on what to do with the concept of medical procedures and how to do them, but they do not teach you about the “being moral” side of dealing with a patient’s health issues. Later in the documentary, one of the doctors mentions that he “wishes he could do better, that he also feels like it is a failure for doctors and the mental mentality they use now was not trained to deal with surreal issues that they face now with patients

when they were in medical school”.
When “being moral” for doctors it concerns how to keep patients positive, looking for more possible answers, and also when or how to tell a patient that they are dying. This is the part that becomes complicated because for some patient’s health, there is no right or possible answer to help them recover. Just as much as a patient want to stay alive, the doctor also wants to help keep them alive or alive for longer. But this is where morality and being realistic comes into place and changes the positive outlook of the situation into a negative one. Telling a patient that they are going to die is never an easy thing to do for doctors and it is even harder for the patients to hear it.
The next step that doctors and patients have to face is that what to do next. For most doctors this means that they have to figure out the best way to tell their patient that their time is coming. Which is difficult because as a human and especially as a doctor you never know when the right time will be. But the best time is to do it as soon as possible. For patients this is their time come to realization that they will not be on earth or be with their families for much longer. Which causes them to start making arrangements to finish or start the process of making sure that their loved one will be taken care of when they are gone.