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MPR News Staff

Atul Gawande on 'callous' medicine and end of life care

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Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande is a surgeon who practices at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Photo Courtesy of Fred Field, 2009.

Surgeon, public health researcher and writer Dr. Atul Gawande first gained fame for his writings about his own mistakes as a doctor and the mistakes he saw being made throughout the medical community.

Gawande's most recent book is "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End." He was in the Twin Cities recently for the Minneapolis Foundation's Face Forward Futurist Conference and spoke with MPR News host Kerri Miller.

Miller starts the conversatin with a question about Gawande's recent comments regarding how medicine treats mortality — he called it callous and inhumane.

Gawande told Miller that one of his biggest struggles as a surgeon and doctor was understanding that sometimes treating a patient didn't actually give them a better life.