Medical Quotes
1. The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
2. Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.
3. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
4. After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
5. Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other
6. The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
7. A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.
8. Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.
9. Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.
10. As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.
11. Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged, let us be loud, let us be bold.
12. Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.
13. It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.
14. The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
15. In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?
16. It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
17. In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.
18. 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.
19. I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
20. Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.
21. Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
25. You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
26. Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
27. You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
28. 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.
29. Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don’t take anything for granted. But here’s the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we’re not that good at doing that.
30. Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that’s where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
31. Disease is the biggest money maker in our economy.
32. 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.
33. The art is long, life is short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, judgment difficult.
34. No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.
35. The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
36. The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It’s where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It’s the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses.
37. 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.
38. One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.
39. Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
40. Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian’s rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess.
41. It’s true that laughter really is cheap medicine. It’s a prescription anyone can afford. And best of all, you can fill it right now.
42. 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
43. Be consistent in your dedication to showing your gratitude to others. Gratitude is a fuel, a medicine, and spiritual and emotional nourishment.
44. The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It’s time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses.
45. Words can be medicines; they can also be poisons. Words can heal; they can also kill… It all depends on how, when and where they are use and against whom! Let us not abuse our words. It’s a misuse of the tongue!
46. And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word ‘natural.’ This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What ‘natural’ has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is ‘pure’ and ‘safe’ and ‘benign’. But the use of ‘natural’ as a synonym for ‘good’ is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.
47. 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.
48. Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.
49. Cure sometimes, treat often and comfort always.
50. The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it
51. Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
52. 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.
53. Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot–despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists–be both.
54. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.
55. 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.
56. When you got a condition, it’s bad to forget your medicine.
57. 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.
58. Medicine is not a science; it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.
59. You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person’s spirit from his body.
60. Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.
