Medicine Quotes

We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, physics, which uses a form of logic - mathematics - as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of a bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact.

Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.

Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect—the beneficial results of suggestion, expectation, and positive thinking.

Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.

Therapy to life: Eat with the wise, and drink with the fools!

Every medicine is vain.

Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most money buys the biggest loudspeaker and is the neo-Brahmin of this new world order. If the ninety-year-old neo-Brahmin on the other side of the earth is terrified of antibiotic resistant flesh-eating bacteria, we must think twice before offering treatment to a twenty-four-year old here. These are the new rules of our global village.

So many come to the sickroom thinking of themselves as men of science fighting disease and not as healers with a little knowledge helping nature to get a sick man well.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

One of the most common and most dangerous misbeliefs is that it is impossible for someone to be stupid just because they are a doctor or a lawyer.

My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother's body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.

Medicine’s a funny business. After all, dispensing chemicals is considered mainstream and diet and nutrition is considered alternative.

How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration.

Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine.

At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill.

Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing.

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.

Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.

In general, empathy is easier the more we can identify with someone. When we can genuinely envision ourselves in a situation, it's possible to intuit what that person's suffering might feel like.

[S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.

A good gulp of hot whisky at bedtime - it's not very scientific but it helps.

Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.

Every creature was designed to serve a purpose. Learn from animals for they are there to teach you the way of life. There is a wealth of knowledge that is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals. Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?" I shook my head, frowned a little. "I really don't. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don't think so. I couldn't be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.

Some of the papers presented at today's medical meeting tell us what we already know but in a much more complicated manner.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Too much profit is being made at the expense of unsuspecting patients.

Wherever a doctor cannot do good he must be kept from doing harm.

Those who do scientific or medical studies and have conclusions are reflecting the results preferred by those who pay them.

But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.

When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

I emphasize this because some of my colleagues, for whose academic attainments I have great respect, argue" 'You assume too much; this is not proved; this is not strictly scientific. We disagree with your neurology and your psychiatry is misleading, therefore you must be wrong.' My reply has been, with all humility: 'Yes, of course,' and I have returned to the labor ward to be greeted by happy women with their newborn babies in their arms: 'How right you are, Doctor, it is so much easier that way.' That is what really matters to the clinician. He should use the method that gives the best and safest result from all points of view until something better is discovered.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions.

Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor.

But while the patient does bear some responsibility, I believe that the onus falls more heavily on the doctor to be attuned to the factors--cultural, ethnic, or just personal style--that influence how patients present their symptoms.

Ossa autem alia quae sunt infra basilare non bene ad sensum apparent nisi ossa illa decoquantur, sed propter peccatum dimitiere consuevi. [The bones which are below the os basilare cannot be well seen unless they are removed and boiled, but owing to the sin involved in this I am accustomed to pass them by.]

Disease often tells its secrets in a casual parenthesis.

Common sense is in medicine the master workman.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

I submit a body of facts which cannot be invalidated. My opinions may be doubted, denied, or approved, according as they conflict or agree with the opinions of each individual who may read them; but their worth will be best determined by the foundation on which they rest—the incontrovertible facts.

A little toxin is the best tonic.

The physician heals Nature makes well.

That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.

All bleeding eventually stops.

In our society, unless something can be measured then it doesn't exist. This is especially true in the world of medicine.

When you hear hoofbeats think of horses before zebras.

Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.

Without the patient, there is no healthcare.

...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption.

Calling holistic medicine "alternative medicine" is no longer appropriate. The best approach now is "integrated medicine" in which we take the best of both worlds.