Medicine Quotes - Page 5

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.

Peter Conrad

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.

Peter Conrad

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

Abhijit Naskar

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

Michael Perkins

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

Peter Conrad

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.

Peter Conrad

[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; and the invasion of a human organism by cholera germs carries with it no more the stamp of "illness" than the souring of milk by other forms of bacteria. (Sedgwick, 1972, p. 211)

Peter Conrad

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

Peter Conrad

[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.

Peter Conrad

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.

Catherine Bailey

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

Peter Conrad

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.

Anurag Shourie

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.

George Eliot

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

Chuck Bridges

Doctors is all swabs.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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 prove it. So, er…bury him, keep him nice and cool, and tell him to come and see me next week. In daylight, for preference.""But he’s still breathing!” “These are just reflex actions that might easily confuse the layman,” said the doctor airily. Chidder sighed. He suspected that the Guild, who after all had an unrivalled experience of sharp knives and complex organic compounds, was much better at elementary diagnostics than were the doctors. The Guild might kill people, but at least it didn’t expect them to be grateful for it.

Terry Pratchett

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.

Abraham Verghese

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.

William Osler

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.

Pamela Grim

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

Faraz

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

Samuel Shem

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

Samuel Shem

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.

Samuel Sagan

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

Abraham Verghese

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.

Danielle Ofri

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

Deyth Banger

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 in boys.In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948-- on a five-year-old girl.

Eve Ensler

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.

Terrence Holt

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 rolling-mill.

Maurice Renard

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

Sebastian Marincolo

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.

Seth Holmes

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.

Atul Gawande

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 agonizing that, despite the Lord’s call, my decision to leave medicine was reckless or irresponsible. Such fears are normal and expected, but reflect our own limited understanding, rather than an enduring faith in the Lord. God is sovereign over our lives, and whatever doubts we have, we may trust that he knows the path and is in command over all.Christ has already overcome, and so we have nothing to fear. From Proverbs: “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9), and “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6)...From 1 Thessalonians 1:3: We remember “before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Christ died and rose victorious over death and sin to free us, so that we may have the hope and fulfillment that comes from living in him.

Kathryn Butler

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

Graham Greene

Good medicine always tastes bad.

Ron Hall

The patient is the one with the disease

Samuel Shem

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

Samuel Shem

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

Edward E. Rosenbaum

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.

Atul Gawande

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Helen Varney

Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

Hippocrates

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

Samuel Shem

All bleeding eventually stops.

Jeffrey M. Goller M.D.

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 beings go; people who are heartbreakingly stupid and ditty and drunk and high and obnoxious--unbelievably obnoxious. These people have all flowed out of the darkest side of life. And when you are finished with them, that's mostly where they'll return. So each of you who is thinking you want to go into emergency medicine will have to ask yourself, 'Do I really want to do this?'" I tapped my chest. "I know the answer for myself--every day I work I'm taking care of someone who is just like my grandfather, someone just like my mother. But everyone in this room needs to ask himself or herself, 'Do I want to spend the rest of my life with addicts and idiots and drunks and psychotics? Is this what will make me happy?'" I peered at all of them over the top of the microphone. "Very few sane people answer yes.

Pamela Grim

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

Andreas Moritz

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

Hippocrates

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

J.R. Ward

Believing is half the cure.

Toba Beta

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

Charlotte Gerson

...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.

Michelle Au

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...

Abraham Verghese

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.

Jerome Groopman

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

Richard Diaz

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

George Carlin

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

Voltaire

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

Hippocrates

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.

Atul Gawande

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

Hippocrates

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.

Alan W. Watts

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Medicine Quotes - Page 5

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