Quotes About Health

I ate no delicacies, no meat or wine entered my mouth. Daniel 10:3 The emphasis here is upon restriction of diet rather than complete abstention.

The partial fast allows a great many variations which have been tried with blessing and benefit. There is the method of living exclusively on one type of food for the duration of the fast.

Others have partially fasted by omitting a certain meal each day, thus strictly limiting the quantity of food consumed.

Vigilance is needed to ensure that the value of omitting the one meal is not offset by increasing the intake at others!

The partial fast is of great value, especially where circumstances make it impossible or inconvenient to undertake a normal fast. Certainly it requires no less self-discipline. It can be used as a steppingstone to the normal fast by those who have never fasted before. One of its great advantages is that even after being sustained for a long period, normal eating can be resumed almost at once, which is not the case with the other two kinds of fasting.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated.

We're always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.

The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't? A decade

the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.

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.

As we age, it's as if the calcium seeps out of our skeletons and into our tissues.

Well, if I'm able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I'm willing to stay alive.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently.

we have no good metrics for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

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.

As you get older, the lordosis of your spine tips your head forward," he said to me. "So when you look straight ahead it's like looking up at the ceiling for anyone else. Try to swallow while looking up: you'll choke once in a while. The problem is common in the elderly. Listen." I realized that I could hear someone in the dining room choking on his food every minute or so.

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life.

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

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses.

In the course of a normal lifetime, the muscles of the jaw lose about 40 percent of their mass and the bones of the mandible lose about 20 percent, becoming porous and weak. The ability to chew declines, and people shift to softer foods, which are generally higher in fermentable carbohydrates and more likely to cause cavities. By the age of sixty, people in an industrialized country like the United States have lost, on average, a third of their teeth.

Staying at home is recommended.

We said the medicines we gave him may have contributed to it.