Quotes About Medicine

but the best surgeons retain a deep recognition of the limitations of both science and human skill.

lives. As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood.

As with many doctors, his job was his identity.

The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The

Medicine and public health have transformed the trajectory of our lives. For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

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.

In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

Surgeons are so absurdly ultraspecialized that when we joke about right ear surgeons and left ear surgeons, we have to check to be sure they don't exist

Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.

One of the reasons for this dramatic shift in how decisions are made in medicine was a 1984 book

not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in the priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We'll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, chaplains, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now—

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

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.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.

defrailulation specialists

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

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.

From World War II onward, the picture shifted radically. Sulfa, penicillin, and then numerous other antibiotics became available for treating infections. Drugs to control blood pressure and treat hormonal imbalances were discovered. Breakthroughs in everything from heart surgery to artificial respirators to kidney transplantation became commonplace. Doctors became heroes, and the hospital transformed from a symbol of sickness and despondency to a place of hope and cure.

A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the overwhelming anxiety—anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about loved ones, anxiety about finances," she explained. "There are many worries and real terrors." No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany.

But I said nothing of such things when I asked my patient's permission to do his line.

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 medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

People often look to great athletes for lessons about performance. ... But success in medicine has dimensions that cannot be found on a playing field.