70K WAYS HUMAN BODY CAN FAIL

Atul Gawande discussing the ways we fail on episode 42 of TKP:

"For most of human history, for like 99.99% of it, our world was governed largely by ignorance. We did not know the diseases that could afflict the human body or understand them, let alone what to do about them. We didn’t understand how societies rose and fell. We didn’t understand how economics worked, even in the most basic components.

Now we’re in a place in the 21st century, we haven’t answered all the questions, but we have equally now a problem of ignorance and of what they called ineptitude—I prefer to call it failure to deliver, a little less judgmental. Which is that, you know, now we’ve discovered...for example, in healthcare, we’ve discovered that there are more than 70,000 ways the human body can fail. 70,000 different diagnoses for our 13 organ systems. We’ve developed 6,000 drugs, 4,000 medical and surgical procedures and now we’re trying to deploy that capability, town by town, to everybody alive. Then when you start dissecting, what’s the nature of that fallibility, that failure to deliver. Well, first of all, that list I just told you, that’s incredible. There’s nothing like it.