Quotes About Healthcare

For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life." No more annual exams, cancer screenings, mammograms, and any other measure "expected of a responsible person with health insurance….Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life.

Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation.

The first time I had a pap smear done, I was so traumatized, I now take prescription Xanax to avoid having panic attacks when I get pap smears done now. And I'm only 24. How many more am I going to have to have for the rest of my life? What am I going to do when I want to have children and every doctor wants to shove his/her fingers and tools inside me?

Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs (antidepressant, anti-inflammatory, antiallergy, diet, ulcer—you name it) on prime-time television. We can't just go to the drugstore and buy them. The doctor must prescribe them. So why are drug companies investing big money to reach us, the consumers, directly?

Going to the doctor—at least this doctor—was like going to the hairdresser. The client (patient) has to let the professional know what she wants out of each visit. The patient is in charge.

Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment, in fact, among people who do get

Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment, in fact, among people who do get cancer, only 12 percent actually want to do so.

Although it's risky and hard, seek first to understand, or diagnose before you prescribe, is a correct principle manifest in many areas of life. It's the mark of all true professionals. It's critical for the optometrist, it's critical for the physician. You wouldn't have any confidence in a doctor's prescription unless you had confidence in the diagnosis.

Somewhere in the world is...The world's worst doctor and he could be yours.

I had entered Kidneyland. I was officially a patient now. Somehow, I had managed to walk through the door: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SICKNESS. We have air-conditioning and HBO.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life.

ofrecer a los donantes de órganos incentivos como «amnistía fiscal, seguro de enfermedad garantizado, becas universitarias para sus hijos, depósitos en sus cuentas de jubilación, etcétera.»

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't.

Among the best solutions: using disposable blood-pressure cuffs on incoming patients; infusing hospital equipment with silver ion particles to create an antimicrobial shield; and forbidding doctors to wear neckties because, as the U.K. Department of Health has noted, they "are rarely laundered," "perform no beneficial function in patient care," and "have been shown to be colonized by pathogens.

In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.

En las naciones industrializadas, la tasa actual de muerte materna durante el parto es de 9 mujeres por cada 100.000 partos. Hace solo cien años, la tasa era más de cincuenta veces más alta.

el Instituto de Medicina calculaba que cada año mueren entre 44.000 y 98.000 norteamericanos a causa de errores hospitalarios evitables —más muertos que por accidentes de automóvil o cáncer de mama—, y que uno de los principales errores es la infección de heridas. ¿La mejor medicina para evitar las infecciones? Hacer que los médicos se laven las manos con más frecuencia.

prohibir a los médicos llevar corbata, porque, como ha observado el Departamento de Salud del Reino Unido, «se lavan muy de vez en cuando», «no tienen ningún efecto beneficioso en la atención al paciente» y «se ha demostrado que están colonizadas por patógenos».

The same thing happens if health care is distributed in a similar fashion: people consume more of it than if they were charged the sticker price. This means the "worried well" crowd out the truly sick, wait times increase for everyone, and a massive share of the costs go to the final months of elderly patients' lives, often without much real advantage.

Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon. This

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005."43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)