Medicine Quotes - Page 5

The story was an 82 year old guy with a broken neck. He had apparently fallen in his bathroom that morning, cracking his 1st and 2nd vertebrae. I had a vague memory from medical school that this wasn't a good thing--the expression "hangman's fracture" kept bobbing up from the well of facts I do not use --but I had a much more distinct impression that this was not a case for cardiology."And Ortho isn't taking him because?" I said wearily."Because he's got internal organs, dude."I sighed. "So why me?""Because they got an EKG."The MAO was clearly enjoying himself. I remembered he had recently been accepted to a cardiology fellowship. I braced myself for the punch line."And?""And there's ectopy on it. Ectopy." He then made a noise intended to suggest a ghost haunting something.

the medicine wheel is inside of you it not in a pile of stones the medicine wheel is inside the heart and body

One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead....

After dinner rest a while after supper walk a mile.

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?The patients get better and leave.

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

Common sense is in medicine the master workman.

As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood. We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it can be.

As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.

A little toxin is the best tonic.

Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.

The American Medical Association operating from a platform of negative vigilance presents no solutions but busily fights each change and then loudly supports it against the next proposal.

No doctor knows everything. There's a reason why it's called "practising" medicine.

Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.

When a situation feels like a matter of life and death the deep self is close at hand and it already carries inner medicine and its own life remedy.

A doctor's mission should not be to prevent death, but more importantly it should be to improve the quality of life.

[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.

There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it’s actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.

Above all else, above the mechanics, even, a doctor should be thoroughly grounded in morality.

Here in Bosnia I had already seen several cases of rheumatic fever and a case we thought was miliary tuberculosis, diseases now rare in America. It was sobering to think that the mundane process of vaccinating these children might ultimately save more lives than any UN-brokered peace treaty.

If ever there was a plant that speaks to its connection to your heart, it is sweet blue violet. Not only does violet help your body dissolve cysts, lumps, and bumps, this plant’s soothing nature can help you dissolve the red-hot burn of anger, cool the draining white heat of frustration and resentment, and relieve the simmering roil of feeling stuck in separation when ruled by your judgmental mind.

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.

Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.

Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology.

It costs about the same to house a maximum-security young adult prisoner for a year as it does to send his law-abiding counterpart to Harvard.

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.

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

Sometimes it all becomes too much. Your body and mind will just give way. Part of you may want to blissfully fade into nothing, but you never do. After a while all the memories and emotions make you shut down but never fully disappear—it’s safer for you this way, to be excluded. It’s a time to be alone, to heal, and to find yourself. It doesn’t mean you’ve given up or stopped trying; it just means you know what’s best for you.Breathing is medicine. I forgot how to breathe, but I’m learning all over again.

To cure sometimes to relieve often to comfort always.

If the cardiologist thinks the heart is a wonderful organ, the cardiologist never have heard of the uterus.

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years.

Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux.

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

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.

Doctors are allowed to practice medicine. What are you called when you are not practicing any more and finally know what your doing?

Public "facts" are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers.

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

To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?

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.

Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body's oxygen cycle.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis.

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.

To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got.

A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.

What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.

Lord, give me strength and ability to understand when I can heal,but give me the wisdom to understand when my profession is useless.

I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.''You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.

I am rather disturbed by the fact that so many people—who are neither medical professionals nor trans themselves—would want to hear all of the gory details regarding transsexual physical transformations, or would feel that they have any right to ask us about the state of our genitals.

In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.

Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?

Nothing is wrong in taking medicine when you’re sick, but something is wrong if It is been taking by you to cure the headache of another.

In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the radiologists, pathologists and anaesthesiologists - especially non-white, female ones like me. Apart from colour, we were shunned because we did not bring in patients ourselves but, like vultures, lived off the patients generated by other doctors. We were also resented because being hospital-based and not having to rent office space or hire nursing staff, we had low overheads. Since a physician's number of admissions to the hospital and referral pattern determined the degree of attention and regard accorded by colleagues, it was safe for our peers to ignore us and target those in position to send over income-producing referrals. This attitude was mirrored from the board of directors all the way down to the orderlies.

We even save a few lives, but only a fraction of the lives that need to be saved. Soon, we will leave and when we leave there will be nothing to take our place. The meningitis epidemic, cholera, measles, typhoid fever, all preventable diseases, will return and continue as before. The only solution is a political solution, national public health programs, responsible corporations who reap only as much as they sow. Shell Oil with a conscience. Nigeria doesn't need us. What we do here is less than nothing. We take the pressure off the powers that be, making it easier for those who plunder to keep on plundering. This is the humanitarian aid paradox.