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

A little rebellion now and then… is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often)...

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,...

Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying...

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

[Some callers] aren’t paying their electric (bill) in order to get their medicine, … aren’t getting their medicine in order to pay their electric.

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be...

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I...

Among the Secoya, clear guidelines regulate preparation of the medicine. They are adamant about this preparation method and insist that the guidelines be followed. I’ve already discussed some fundamentals of harvesting the plants. When respected,...

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...

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

Eastern medicine is not about curing your sickness. It’s about keeping you well.

I have found that if I tend to a person’s illness rather than to theperson, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk...

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

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred...

So, if you’re a doctor, how can you recognize that you’re having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive...

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the...

There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.

Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.

When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings… and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character…...

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician’s relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

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

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...

You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. – Polidori

Before you examine the body of a patient, be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, you will also come to know his body.

There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells…

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when...

[2. SQUAT PRESS TO THROW WITH MEDICINE BALL Holding a 14-pound ball, Crawford squats, then jumps straight up while throwing the ball upward. He does it five times and then switches to a six-pound ball...

Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

Männliches Schuldverweigerungs-Syndrom”, erklärte mein Vater. “Von 2054 an ist das eine medizinisch anerkannte Krankheit.

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...

What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing...

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80’s. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch’s postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. …...

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

The nineteenth century is called the century of hygiene, and the twentieth is the century of medicine. The twenty-first century may be the century of behavioral change. Changing everyday, long-term behaviors–how we exercise, what we...

Our health care approaches squander billions on extravagant treatment regimes that end up accomplishing little, as a society we refuse to adopt the small, even tiny adjustments that could easily reduce the clawing uncertainties that...

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of “grand hysteria” described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in...

I critique market-based medicine not because I haven’t seen its heights but because I’ve seen its depths.

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill...

The change in medicine over the last 50 years, since our last hospital was built, has largely been change from predominantly in-patient medicine to an emphasis on out-patient.

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is...

It’s like the kid doesn’t want to take any medicine, but it’s good for him, … It’s a little medicine now versus a lot of bad medicine later.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

This (…) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of...

I am a cuddly atheist… I am against creationism being taught in schools because there is empirical evidence that it is a silly notion… I am passionately concerned about the rise in pseudo-science; in beliefs...

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access;...

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do...

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...