If you've got 45 minutes, take a look at this article in the New York Review of Books. It's an analysis of how doctor's think, and how bad habits of mind promote inefficiency and bad outcomes in the health care system. Few can doubt that Western medicine has been a phenomenal success. Heart disease kills two-thirds fewer people now than it did fifty years ago. The frequency of conditions as diverse as stroke and trauma is being gradually checked. Mortality from breast cancer has fallen by a quarter in less than two decades. Doctors would dearly like to attribute these impressive results in Western countries to their accumulated expertise and the advances of science. But as Atul Gawande points out in Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, his latest collection of lucid essays,[1] the residual contradiction is that while medicine succeeds, it never seems to succeed well enough. A doctor's report card might look creditable today. Yet it nevertheless conceals serious unresolved and unacknowledged weaknesses.