Quotes About Medicine

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How

We know less and less about our patients but more and more about our science.

Do we ever say that we need them to agree to it anyway? I've never seen it. Given the stakes, who in their right mind would agree to be practiced upon?

More than 40 percent of oncologists admit to offering treatments that they believe are unlikely to work.

In a sense, the advances of modern medicine have given us two revolutions: we've undergone a biological transformation of the course of our lives and also a cultural transformation of how we think about that course.

The average doctor in a high-risk practice like surgery or obstetrics is sued about once every six years. Seventy percent of the time, the suit is either dropped by the plaintiff or won by the doctor in court. But the cost of defense is high, and when doctors lose, the average jury verdict is half a million dollars. General

Errors are too common and widespread to be explained so simply.

doctors can be stubborn about changing the way we do things.

But it's not only the breadth and quantity of knowledge that has made medicine complicated. It is also the execution—the practical matter of what knowledge requires clinicians to do.

The way that things go wrong in medicine is normally unseen and, consequently, often misunderstood.

And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly.

Four minutes without oxygen would lead to permanent brain damage, if not death.

doctors need to understand that we are businessmen—nothing less, nothing more—and the sooner we accept this the better.

How could anyone who makes a mistake of that magnitude be allowed to practice medicine?

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.

two-thirds of such complications were due to errors in care.

Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.

For this reason, doctors are seldom outraged when the press reports yet another medical horror story. They usually have a different reaction: That could be me.

When things go wrong, it's almost impossible for a physician to talk to a patient honestly about mistakes.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

I was learning. In medicine, we have long faced a conflict between the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with experience. Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and graduated responsibility. And there is reason to think patients actually

percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics

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.

The trouble is that we've built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan. *