Quotes About Medicine

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

Another benefit of going to Cornell is that 90 percent of your friends are doctors.

In medicine, there is always a balance between risk and benefit.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

I do believe at some point in time everyone will be genotyped at birth.

Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works.

Both my parents are doctors, so from the time I was a child, I wanted to do medicine.

Both my parents are doctors.

Because I work on leukemia, the image of cancer I carry in my mind is that of blood. I imagine that doctors who work on breast cancer or pancreatic cancer have very different visualizations.

Well, I've seen a bunch of acupuncturists and one of my sister-in-laws is an herbalist. So I know a lot about alternative medicine. I don't know a lot about the practice but I know about the world.

All medicine is gradations and differences and nuances. And there's such a thing as natural recovery: people spontaneously get better. It happens.

When I was little, I used to suck the candy coating off of Advil and spit the white part back in the bottle.

I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.

I wasn't sued out of medicine, I wasn't arbitrated out of the profession.

I feel badly for the people who suffer from the side effects and consequences of hazardous pharmaceuticals. It's antithetical to the Hippocratic oath.

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of cancer. I decided nobody should suffer that much.

Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.

So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.

Laughter is a way of really letting out all this pressure that you could face in your daily life in the suffering of your people, and comedy is almost like a medicine to your soul in a way.

I'd like to focus on my life on creating new medicines for people who are suffering from rare disease.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.

How can you regret helping a suffering patient?

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.

Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.