Quotes About Ethics

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

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

Do what is right, and do it now.

need to understand how much you're willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.

end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

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.

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

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice. Many

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. At root, the debate is about what mistakes we fear most—the mistake of prolonging suffering or the mistake of shortening valued life.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What

we pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise. This certainly is a factor. But the issue isn't merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.

All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.

Do we ever say that we need them to agree to it anyway? I've never seen it. Given the stakes, who in their right mind would agree to be practiced upon?

More than 40 percent of oncologists admit to offering treatments that they believe are unlikely to work.

individual autonomy hardly seems the ideal we should aim for.

Even good doctors can go bad, and when they do, colleagues tend to be almost entirely unequipped to do anything about them.

It may seem harsh to say, but if it was a sixty-year-old man I would've taken the leg without question." This was partly, I think, a purely emotional unwillingness to cut off the limb of a pretty twenty-three-year-old—the kind of sentimentalism that can get you in trouble.

doctors need to understand that we are businessmen—nothing less, nothing more—and the sooner we accept this the better.

How can this be justified?

We want to see them punished.

Medicine is, I have found, a strange and in many ways disturbing business.

Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.