Quotes About Medicine

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in. We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making the medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

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. Patients

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. I wrote this book in

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We

Medicine was just another a tool you could try, no different from a healing ritual or a family remedy and no more effective.

Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it. This

I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I'd have as a doctor—and, really, as a human being—would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can. But it's proved true, whether with a patient like Jewel Douglass, a friend like Peg Bachelder, or someone I loved as much as my father.

There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

She was starting to grasp that this is what the closing phase of a modern life often looks like—a mounting series of crises from which medicine can offer only brief and temporary rescue. She was experiencing what I have come to think of as the ODTAA syndrome: the syndrome of One Damn Thing After Another.

As medical progress has extended our lives, the result has been what's called the "rectangularization" of survival.

Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that's because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock," Felix Silverstone

There are risks to this surgery, but they used to be much greater.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered. The

In most cases, it wasn't technology that failed. Rather, the physicians did not consider the correct diagnosis in the first place.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What

the individualized, intuitive approach that lies at the center of modern medicine is flawed—it causes more mistakes than it prevents.

A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don't start in independent practice until your midthirties. We

Medical care is about our life and death, and we've always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and

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. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

we pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise. This certainly is a factor. But the issue isn't merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

A resident has a distinctive vantage on medicine. You are an insider, seeing everything and a part of everything; yet at the same time you see it anew.

All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.