Quotes About Healthcare

along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? 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? The field of palliative

Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.

This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.

The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an "activation phenomenon." Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These

The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.

Medicine was just another a tool you could try, no different from a healing ritual or a family remedy and no more effective.

Taking care of a debilitated, elderly person in our medicalized era is an overwhelming combination of the technological and the custodial.

Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it. This

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life;

One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home.

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.

told her that things had taken a turn for the worse, and asked her to come in.

Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that's because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock," Felix Silverstone

the cost of an operation is about half of what it is elsewhere.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more than glancing attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

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

In most cases, it wasn't technology that failed. Rather, the physicians did not consider the correct diagnosis in the first place.

Yet given how much surgery is now done—Americans today undergo an average of seven operations in their lifetime, with surgeons performing more than fifty million operations annually—the amount of harm remains substantial. We continue to have upwards of 150,000 deaths following surgery every year

That's how a doctor earns money, she told me. It's a war with insurance, every step of the way.

we 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. This certainly is a factor. But the issue isn't merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

As recently as 1945, most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980s, just 17 percent did.