Quotes About Medicine

Treating sickness as a business opportunity has just about killed the joy of healing, the very reason most doctors and nurses wanted to go into it in the first place.

though in the year before the first use of X-rays this was not known; indeed, it did not become known for seventy years, when this same thigh was X-rayed after a fall in Monte Carlo in 1963.

Certainly since the Middle Ages we have covered a lot of (medical) ground, gathered an enormous quantity of knowledge and as a result we have so much knowledge that we reach the point of being able to connect the available knowledge, bringing it together. This would foster a deeper insight of the human body and be helpful to develop an overview of the body. The connectivity of knowledge is what this book is about.

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.

Americans see democracy as a remedy for all ills-to be taken three times daily like prescription medicine. It works for them. Ergo - it should work for the world. What America naïvely forgets is that for democracy to function, most of a populace must have something personally that is worth preserving.

It was simply because, as a doctor, I don't believe a drug should be taken for anything that is just uncomfortable or self-limiting.

A surgeon gets $500 for taking out a tumor. A pathologist gets five dollars for examining it, making a diagnosis, recommending further treatment, and predicting the patient's future.

Die Freunde nennen sich aufrichtig; die Feinde sind es: daher man ihren Tadel zur Selbsterkenntnis benutzen sollte, als eine bittre Arznei

While the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.

Ese era el problema con los parientes. Al igual que los médicos aviesos, sabían dónde hacer más daño al tocar.

we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.

the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

Consider the case of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its elderly residents have unusually low end-of-life hospital costs. During their last six months, according to Medicare data, they spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average, and there's no sign that doctors or patients are halting care prematurely. Despite average rates of obesity and smoking, their life expectancy outpaces the national mean by a year.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.

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. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naïve.

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.

If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.

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.

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice. Many