What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.

When COVID-19 surged through a North Dakota community, a battle with the pandemic became a battle among its residents.

Health-care workers have been on the job throughout the pandemic. What can they teach us about the safest way to lift a lockdown?

Why doctors hate their computers.

A search for common ground.

We devote vast resources to intensive, one-off procedures, while starving the kind of steady, intimate care that often helps people more.

How the overdiagnosis of disease makes for unnecessary treatment, high anxiety, and ballooning costs.

Opening up about medical mistakes.

On what you do and don’t learn in medical school.

Why some innovations spread quick while others take decades to catch hold.

What the health care industry can learn from how The Cheesecake Factory does business.

The case for coaches in professions other than music and sports. Like medicine, for example:

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down. It’s too soon to know for sure whether that’s not random, but it seems real. I know that I’m learning again. I can’t say that every surgeon needs a coach to do his or her best work, but I’ve discovered that I do.

A commencement address to the graduates of Harvard Medical School on how their chosen profession is changing and what they’ll need to learn now that they’re out of school.

The doctor and New Yorker writer on embracing the shortcomings of expertise:

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.

How focusing on the neediest patients could radically reduce health care costs.

Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

The decline of the American autopsy and what it says about modern medicine.

Should modern medicine shift its end-of-life priorities, focusing less on staving off death and more on improving a patient’s last days?

Atul Gawande’s recent commencement address at Stanford’s School of Medicine graduation. “Each of you is now an expert. Congratulations. So why—in your heart of hearts—do you not quite feel that way?”