Quotes About Care

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

assisted living isn't really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children.

We're good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides—an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys—and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.

Wilson pointed out angrily that even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly. They at least get to have swings and jungle gyms.

You know, there's this phase of people's lives in which they can't really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.

The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do. (...) But our fight is not always to do more. It is to do right by our patients, even though what is right is not always clear.

We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love.

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.

Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.

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.

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in. We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making the medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

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.

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.

I do not come in saying, 'I'm so sorry.' Instead, it's: 'I'm the hospice nurse, and here's what I have to offer you to make your life better. And I know we don't have a lot of time to waste.

Taking care of a debilitated, elderly person in our medicalized era is an overwhelming combination of the technological and the custodial.

There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The

what living things provide. In place of boredom, they offer spontaneity. In place of loneliness, they offer companionship. In place of helplessness, they offer a chance to take care of another being.

We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love." That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail. "Many of the things that we want for those we care about are things that we would adamantly oppose for ourselves because they would infringe upon our sense of self.

Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have, and, according to what little research has been done, having at least one daughter seems to be crucial to the amount of help you will receive.

That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail. "Many of the things that we want for those we care about are things that we would adamantly oppose for ourselves because they would infringe upon our sense of self.

You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way.

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home.

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