Quotes About Healthcare

The fact is," he says, "we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky.

pharmaceutical industry hasn't given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our

Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy—the removal of a kidney stone—in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.)

Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. —

Despite this, angioplasties remain extremely popular.

Interestingly, in the United States no one has died of old age since 1951, at least not officially, for in that year old age was banished as a cause from death certificates. In Britain, it is still allowed, though not much used.

He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.

The one positive to come out of the experience is that opioid fatalities have led to a rise in organ donations.16 In 2000, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 150 organ donors were opioid addicts; today the number is over 3,500.

The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today's are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.

Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations," according to The New York Times.

A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 percent lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion.

there are about seven thousand rare diseases—so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all.

It hardly needs pointing out that for most of history the focus of medicine has been to make sick people better, but now increasingly doctors devote their energies to trying to head off problems before they even arise, through programmes of screening and the like, and that changes the dynamics of care entirely.

Atul Gawande has written, "is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.

apply not just to underprivileged citizens but to prosperous white college-educated Americans when compared with their socioeconomic equivalents abroad. This is all a touch counterintuitive when you consider that America spends more on health care than any other nation—

Where America really differs from other countries is in the colossal costs of its health care.

The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn't necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

The Gates Foundation's whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it.

Republicans are taking the defeat over Health Care as well as Tiger Woods took to marriage.

We're all gonna be gay if we get health care!

Republicans: 'we fought the good fight' - yeah, it woulda been worth it if we could have prevented just one poor kid from getting a free inhaler.

Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries where they live longer than us...they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom!

Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day. p153