Quotes About Health

As medical progress has extended our lives, the result has been what's called the "rectangularization" of survival.

It used to be 'Two hip replacements today—yay!'" he recalled. "Then it became 'Two hip replacements today—ugh.

There are risks to this surgery, but they used to be much greater.

It is much harder to measure how much more worth people find in being alive than how many fewer drugs they depend on or how much longer they can live. But could anything matter more?

If any link between psychology and the full moon exists, it would seem to be protective.

The hardest substance in the human body is the white enamel of the teeth

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. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

Oh thank God I can go myself to the bathroom," Makover told me. "You would think it's nothing. You're young. You'll understand when you're older, but the best thing in your life is when you can go yourself to the bathroom.

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

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

two months before he left the hospital. Weak and debilitated, he lost his limousine business and his home

her arm. Her face sagged. Her speech slurred. Although

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

How long has she been without an airway?

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

The single most serious threat she faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

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 question was how to buy the child time to find out. It wasn't clear he'd last the night.

Research has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels.

It seemed as if, once aging led to debility, it was impossible for anyone to be happy. *

the greater blood flow to the face drained blood from the brain.)

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?

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.

Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.