Quotes About Balance

We witnessed for ourselves the consequences of living for the best possible day today instead of sacrificing time now for time later.

Well, if I'm able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I'm willing to stay alive.

Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening problem or the problem that bothered her the most. But this was evidently not what he thought. He asked almost nothing about either issue. Instead, he spent much of the exam looking at her feet. The single most serious threat she faced was [...] falling. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered. The

neither flushed nor pale.

We tend to give some variables too much weight and wrongly ignore others.

A good computer program consistently and automatically gives each factor its appropriate weight.

Yet compassion and technology aren't necessarily incompatible; they can be mutually reinforcing.

doctors need to understand that we are businessmen—nothing less, nothing more—and the sooner we accept this the better.

An inherent tension exists between brevity and effectiveness. Cut too much and you won't have enough checks to improve care. Leave too much in and the list becomes too long to use.

The single most serious threat she faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.

spine tips your head forward," he said to me. "So when you look straight ahead it's like looking up at the ceiling for anyone else. Try to swallow while looking up: you'll choke once in a while.

Wisdom is prudent strength.

The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. *

What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

I tried to sound firm without being harsh. "You

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise.

An inherent tension exists between brevity and effectiveness. Cut too much and you won't have enough checks to improve care. Leave too much in and the list becomes too long to use. Furthermore

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet

Neff's philosophy is, as he put it, "hard on behavior but soft on the person.

When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that there are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value.

The pressure remains all in one direction, toward doing more, because the only mistake clinicians seem to fear is doing too little. Most have no appreciation that equally terrible mistakes are possible in the other direction—that doing too much could be no less devastating to a person's life.