Quotes About Healthcare

What's the shortest time you've seen and the longest time you've seen for people who took no treatment? Three months was the shortest, she said, three years the longest. And with treatment? She got mumbly. Finally she said that the longest might not have been that much more than three years. But with treatment, the average should shift toward the longer end.

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How

A team at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles had actually gotten far enough along to begin human trials of a temporary, bioengineered liver.

We know less and less about our patients but more and more about our science.

He decided to put off the follow-up appointment. It was ultimately a year before he returned to see Benzel. A repeat MRI showed the tumor had enlarged.

Precisely when and how many such procedures would be necessary over the years they could not say.

When other doctors needed an orthopedist for family and friends, they called on him.

But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals.

that many decisions made by physicians appear to be arbitrary—highly variable, with no obvious explanation.

The medical officer's microplan was a sheaf of ragged paper, with marker-drawn maps and penciled-in tables. The first page said that he had recruited twenty-two teams of two vaccinators each to cover a population of 34,144 people. "How do you know this population estimate is right?" Pankaj asked. The officer replied that he'd done a house-to-house survey.

But it's not only the breadth and quantity of knowledge that has made medicine complicated. It is also the execution—the practical matter of what knowledge requires clinicians to do.

Discussion had brought La Crosse's end-of-life costs down to half the national average. It was that simple—and that complicated.

And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly.

The Emanuels described a third type of doctor-patient relationship, which they called "interpretive." Here the doctor's role is to help patients determine what they want. Interpretive doctors ask, "What is most important to you? What are your worries?" Then, when they know your answers, they tell you about the red pill and the blue pill and which one would most help you achieve your priorities.

When the patient complained of pain, Goodman refused to admit that anything needed to be done.

Whether insurance is provided by the government or by corporations, there is no reason to think that the battles—over the fees charged, the bills rejected, the preapproval contortions—will ever end.

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.

After a while, though, it seemed that the only thing he thought about was getting through all his patients as quickly as possible.

The reason has to be that doctors remain at least partly motivated by the hope of doing meaningful and respected work for people and society.

The question therefore is... how can we build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what's most important to them at the end of their lives

The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it. In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in the final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit

Eleanor Bratton, without question, would have been treated completely differently depending on where she went, who she saw, or even just when she saw me

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians.