Atul Gawande

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families of the terminally ill.

**A new unabridged recording** A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul...

Frontline teams up with writer and surgeon Atul Gawande to examine how doctors care for terminally ill patients. In conjunction with Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, the film explores the relationships between doctors and patients nearing the end of life, and shows how many doctors, including himself, struggle to talk honestly and openly.