Quotes About Medical

This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.

As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture.

where they had control--their skills, for example--these doctors sought betterment. They understood themselves to be part of a larger world of medical knowledge and accomplishment. Moreover, they believed they could measure up in it...partly...a function of...camaraderie as a group.

the cost of an operation is about half of what it is elsewhere.

Drug and medical device companies offered invitations to free dinners around town nightly. And there were over five thousand three hundred salespeople from some twelve hundred companies registered in attendance here—more than one for every two surgeons. The

Yet given how much surgery is now done—Americans today undergo an average of seven operations in their lifetime, with surgeons performing more than fifty million operations annually—the amount of harm remains substantial. We continue to have upwards of 150,000 deaths following surgery every year

was once on trauma duty when a young man about twenty years old was rolled in, shot in the buttock.

A team at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles had actually gotten far enough along to begin human trials of a temporary, bioengineered liver.

anyone who really knows what it is like to cut a stomach cancer from a patient

He decided to put off the follow-up appointment. It was ultimately a year before he returned to see Benzel. A repeat MRI showed the tumor had enlarged.

Precisely when and how many such procedures would be necessary over the years they could not say.

We may have lumped several different diseases together in describing the syndrome.

But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals.

that many decisions made by physicians appear to be arbitrary—highly variable, with no obvious explanation.

Then comes what still seems surreal to me. You reach in, and instead of finding a tumor or some other abnormality, as surgeons usually do when we go into someone's belly, you find five tiny wiggling toes, a knee, a whole leg. And suddenly you realize you have a new human being struggling in your hands. You almost forget the mother on the table.

It may seem harsh to say, but if it was a sixty-year-old man I would've taken the leg without question." This was partly, I think, a purely emotional unwillingness to cut off the limb of a pretty twenty-three-year-old—the kind of sentimentalism that can get you in trouble.

He ignored the obvious on X rays.

How long has she been without an airway?

he told them of the dire condition she was in when she arrived

It was estimated that, nationwide, upward of forty-four thousand patients die each year at least partly as a result of errors in care.

Most surgeons are sued at least once in the course of their careers. Studies

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

fewer than 2 percent of the patients who had received substandard care ever filed suit. Conversely, only a small minority among the patients who did sue had in fact been the victims of negligent care.

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.