Quotes About Health

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?

So today, with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time.

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

alone. His condition deteriorated rapidly.

Once again, the salient risk factors seem to be social rather than physical.

His thirty-something son moved in to care for him.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness

waiting for the sick feeling to pass

what treatments they were being given

she began to lose her appetite, and strong odors became intolerable.

The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. *

to make sure that no physical illness could account for any dangerous behavior.

believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.

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

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

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

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.

This is normal. Although the processes can be slowed—diet and physical activity can make a difference—they cannot be stopped.

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

As you get older, the lordosis of your spine tips

What's more, Eleanor's fever had gone away;

But then I told him there was still one other possibility that I couldn't get out of my head: a necrotizing fasciitis.

He's too obese, I thought to myself.