There is a great commencement speech that Atul Gawande gave to freshly-minted medicine professionals. Gawande is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. The speech paints a troubling but still a hopeful picture of a profession in transition:
The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.
Read the whole commencement speech from New Yorker.
