Quotes About Medical

But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences

percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics

To maintain the same volume of blood flow through our narrowed and stiffened blood vessels, the heart has to generate increased pressure. As a result, more than half of us develop hypertension by the age of sixty-five.

Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can't eat on your own?

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions.

At the M & M, the burden of responsibility falls on the attending.

Some attendings shook their heads in sympathy.

what treatments they were being given

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

The neurosurgeon had already gone over them in detail.

At times, they made her wonder if she had the right doctors

Thirteen minutes after I took him off the ventilator

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul.

an average of $94,000 during the last year of life with a metastatic breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with $12,000-a-month chemotherapy, $4,000-a-day intensive care, $7,000-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and few are good at knowing when to stop.

so the smaller the patient (and his or her blood supply) the greater the effect. Members

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

So this is the way it unfolds. In the absence of what people like my grandfather could count on—a vast extended family constantly on hand to let him make his own choices—our elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.

I did not say that the line was eight inches long and would go into his vena cava, the main blood vessel to his heart. Nor did I say how tricky the procedure would be.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet

And the insight was that as people's capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives—resisting the urge to fiddle and fix and control. It was not hard to see how important this idea could be for the patients I encountered in my daily practice—people facing mortal circumstances at every phase of life.

the team decided whether the doctor was fit to return to practice. Neff

But once he put his recommendations down on paper it was hard for hospitals and medical groups not to follow through and hold doctors to the plan.