Quotes about medicine

Medicine is not a science it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.

Much of the mystery surrounding drug action can be cleared up by recognizing that drugs affect only the rate at which biologic functions proceed they do not change the basic nature of existing processes or create new functions.

Those who have dissected or inspected many [bodies] have at least learnt to doubt while others who are ignorant of anatomy and do not take the trouble to attend it are in no doubt at all.

The other thing I remember about the earlier and more active stages of my illness is having a black panther under my bed. After a while it was discovered that I was simply hallucinating as the result of too much arsenic in the medicine I was being given but at the time it must have been even more terrifying for my parents than it was for me.

Effort does matter diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.

The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth and he that is wise will not abhor them.

I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of the illness in this world is the doctor's own illness his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history it describes the theatre of events.

I laugh for sheer medicinal purposes because I feel I might die otherwise.

There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

Breathing is medicine. I forgot how to breathe, but I’m learning all over again.

I understand Medicine, Forensics... I can learn it in the frame of 1-2 years... No Problem in that.

It now appears most of us need about 5,000 units a day if we avoid the sun. The government was off by a factor of ten; an ,i>“order-of-magnitude error.”,/i> Mistakes of this scale are rare in medicine.

If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.

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.

An infantryman’s job is to deliver his enemies into the waiting hands of Death. It is Doc’s job to protect his brothers from Death, to knock him aside and say, “Not today.

Think of exercise as medicine and take your daily prescription.

Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.

The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.

Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

Critical thinking helps us to more clearly understand situations, patients, colleagues, and our agendas, negative emotions, attitudes, motivations, talents, and growing edges. This not only helps us to have a greater grasp of reality but also stops the drain of psychological energy that is necessary to be defensive or to protect our image. Because critical thinking is not natural, although we may think it is for us, it takes discipline, a willingness to face the unpleasant, and a stamina that al

Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.

We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression—some of the most insidious drugs ever—, drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs for emphysema and drugs for erectile disfunction—maybe the most useful of them all. And let’s not forget the side effects of these wonder drugs! It’s cliche to even talk about drug advertisements and the laundry list of side effects tacked onto the end o

Of all the remedies it has pleased almighty God to give man to relieve his suffering, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.

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Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.

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.

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

Good medicine always tastes bad.

The patient is the one with the disease

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

Doctors are great--as long as you don't need them.

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 res

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.

Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra

All bleeding eventually stops.

Every day," I said, "every day I go to work and I see my granddad. I see the drunks and the addicts, the people who have fallen right off the edge of the earth. I see people who have made every bad move anyone could make, made every major mistake there was to be made, and by the time I see them, they are paying for it, sometimes with their lives. That's why they came to the ER. "When you work in emergency medicine, you are seeing patients who are the least common denominator as far as human bein

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.

The art is long, life is short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, judgment difficult.

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it.

Believing is half the cure.

Modern allopathic medicine is the only major science stuck in the pre-Einstein era.

...by the end of my first week as an intern, I am just about ready to throw my pager out the window. A high window. Overlooking a trash compactor. Filled with highly corrosive acid.

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated...

The freedom of patient speech is necessary if the doctor is to get clues about the medical enigma before him. If the patient is inhibited, or cut off prematurely, or constrained into one path of discussion, then the doctor may not be told something vital. Observers have noted that, on average, physicians interrupt patients within eighteen seconds of when they begin telling their story.

Medicine is a golden goose that has to be killed because every time the goose lays a golden egg, someone gets sick or dead.

Doctors is all swabs.

The doctor looked shifty. “He’s still breathing,” he said. “Look, his pulse is nearly humming and he’s got a temperature you could fry eggs on.” He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn’t going to get anywhere if people could understand it. “Pyrocerebrum ouerf culinaire,” he said, after working it out in his head. “Well, what can you do about it?” said Arthur. “Nothing. He’s dead. All the medical tests prov

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.

We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succesion. THESE ARE OUR METHODS - to carefully observe the phenomena of life in all its stages , to cultivate reasoning faculty so as to be able to know the true from the false. THIS IS OUR WORK - to prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick.

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.

Be what you want to be,not what your parents want.

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

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

Primum non nocere, 'First, don't make things worse,' was an essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortunately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modern medicine aims at getting rid of patients' symptoms. Little, if any consideration is given to the fact that some of these symptoms may actually be used by the body in an attempt to correct deeper disorders. When this is the case, suppressing the symptom does not necessarily help the patient.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone

But at the most basic level, doctors need to be able to come forward with their errors and near-misses, otherwise we will never know where the problems lay.

The medicine it's three times everyday taking cold water shower.

In the nineteenth century, girls who learned to develop orgasmic capacity by masturbation were regarded as medical problems. Often they were 'treated' or 'corrected' by amputation or cautery of the clitoris or 'miniature chastity belts,' sewing the vaginal lips together to put the clitoris out of reach, and even castration by surgical removal of the ovaries. But there are no references in the medical literature to the surgical removal of testicles or amputation of the penis to stop masturbation

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

To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the roll

The pressures of the current neoliberal capitalist system of health care and its financing force health professionals into a double bind. Either they spend the time and energy necessary to listen to and fully treat the patient and put their job and clinic in economic jeopardy, or they move at a frenetic pace to keep their practice afloat and only partially attend to the patient in their presence.

In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating.

For years I had convinced myself that, as a doctor, I sacrificed moments with friends, family, and my husband for the greater good. The call to heal the sick and tend the injured superseded all else. The Lord heaped blessings upon me, and I hurled them back in the name of “service” to him.I’m a woman surgeon, I would snap. You made me this way. I have a legacy to carry on...The prospect of abandoning a secure position with excellent prospects for advancement terrified me. I spent many nights ago

He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?

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.

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

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.

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

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

Cure sometimes, treat often and comfort always.

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.

Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.

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

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

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

When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.

[T]here are no illnesses in nature, only relationships. There are, of course, naturally occurring events, including infectious viruses, malignant growths, ruptures of tissues, and unusual chromosome constellations, but these are not ipso facto illnesses. Without the social meaning that humans attach to them they do not constitute illness or disease: The fracture of a septuagenarian's femur has, within the world of nature, so more significance than the snapping of an autumn leaf from its twig; an

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

[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.

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.

What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view.

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.

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

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