Top 68 Quotes About Doctors And Medicine
#1. The best doctors and medicine in the world can't save you if you don't do what you're supposed to do.
Magic Johnson
#2. I'm a sex addict. It's my cross to bear. It's a real disease with doctors and medicine and everything!
Will Ferrell
#3. What is the difference between a Doctor of Medicine and a Doctor of Theology? One prescribes drugs, while the other might as well be on drugs.
Pat Condell
#5. Christianity is fundamentally convalescence..God is not only the doctor who prescribes, He is the nurse who lifts up our powerless head and puts the spoon in our mouth ... And He is the medicine.
John Piper
#6. I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.
Dave Barry
#7. Medicine's a funny business. After all, dispensing chemicals is considered mainstream and diet and nutrition is considered alternative.
Charles F. Glassman
#8. The general public is easy. You don't have to answer to anyone; and as long as you follow the rules of your profession, you needn't worry about the consequences. But the problem with the powerful and rich is that when they are sick, they really want their doctors to cure them.
Moliere
#9. The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.
Mark Forsyth
#11. May the pain of every living creature be completely cleared away. May I be the doctor and the medicine and may I be the nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed.
Shantideva
#12. Doctors who spend more time talking into their tape recorders instead of looking into the eyes of their patients. (Spare us the "HMOs only give us so much time" diatribe. Medicine is about giving scared people comfort and help for people whose pain level is matched only by their anxiety level.)
Karl Albrecht
#13. A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.
Philip Ball
#14. Doctors said 'go home and enjoy what little is left of your life'. He recovered.
Richard M. Schulze
#15. I'm human, we all are - all doctors are - and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you'd get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#16. A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.
Mark Twain
#17. 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 idea and the practices built up thereon.
Herbert M. Shelton
#18. The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
Marcel Proust
#19. Most people are squeamish about saying how much they earn, but in medicine the situation seems especially fraught. Doctors aren't supposed to be in it for the money, and the more concerned a doctor seems to be about making money the more suspicious people become about the care being provided.
Atul Gawande
#20. At 3, I played an innocent game of doctor, minus the stethoscope and medicine bag.
Pattie Mallette
#21. Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, "Oh, he has autism. That's the problem" - and then he didn't treat the GI problem.
Temple Grandin
#23. Old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine.
Alexander McCall Smith
#24. Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, but then later discovering that he will lose, will harm him more than by telling him that he may lose, but then he wins.
Suzy Kassem
#25. I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it's not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.
Atul Gawande
#26. Fun is the cheapest and best medicine in the world for your children as well as for yourself. Give it to them in good large doses. It will not only save you doctors' bills, but it will also help to make your children happier, and will improve their chances in life.
Orison Swett Marden
#28. Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends.
Andrew Weil
#29. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
Paul Kalanithi
#30. Nor bring, to see me cease to live,
Some doctor full of phrase and fame,
To shake his sapient head, and give
The ill he cannot cure a name.
Matthew Arnold
#31. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#33. I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions - frenulum, otitis, glycolysis - was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#34. This generation of little children is the 7th Generation. Not just Indian children but white, black, yellow and red. Our grandfathers said the 7th generation would provide new spiritual leaders, medicine people, doctors, teachers and our great chiefs. There is a spiritual rebirth going on.
Clyde Bellecourt
#35. I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone.
Dave Barry
#36. After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
Chuck Palahniuk
#37. Acknowledging the important role of the emotions in health and illness, medicine must reexamine its concepts of disease causation.
John E. Sarno
#38. I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.
Hugh Laurie
#39. My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, 'You are a genius, my love!' To which I replied, 'My girl,' whispering, 'Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.
Roman Payne
#40. Man is not made for space. But with the help of biologists and medical doctors, he can be prepared and accommodated.
Wernher Von Braun
#41. Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
Leo Tolstoy
#42. Cultural humility acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures - their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine - to the patient's bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior.
Anne Fadiman
#43. 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 up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.
Denis Parsons Burkitt
#44. I'm the daughter of two Indian immigrant doctors, and I have an older sister and younger brother, and none of us have pursued medicine as a career. We're all over the artistic side of things.
Aarti Mann
#45. women enjoyed more freedom in ancient Egypt than they did in other civilizations, in many cases for thousands of years to come, they had house pets, used a form of chewing gum made from myrrh and wax and some Egyptian doctors actually specialized in different areas of medicine.
Martin R. Phillips
#46. Mind-body medicine should not be an 'alternative,' nor should complementary and integrative medicine be something doctors are not exposed to during their training.
Bernie Siegel
#47. Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.
Alice Dreger
#48. 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
#49. We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.
Atul Gawande
#50. I was actually accepted into medical school in Italy. But then I wanted to come back and learn medicine in Germany. And while waiting, I decided to join a business school. I figured it would be useful for doctors to know some business as well!
Jochen Zeitz
#51. In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#52. A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#53. It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within.
Albert Schweitzer
#54. Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine - that was the doctors' domain - but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation.
Emma Donoghue
#55. I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
Freeman Dyson
#56. Doctors, like all other people, are subject to prejudice and discrimination. While bias can be a problem in any profession, in medicine, the stakes are much higher.
Damon Tweedy
#57. The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.
Lewis Thomas
#58. One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.
Atul Gawande
#59. Research is subordinated (not to a long-term social benefit) but to an immediate commercial profit. Currently, disease (not health) is one of the major sources of profit for the pharmaceutical industry, and the doctors are willing agents of those profits.
Pierre Bosquet
#60. The mans prostate was so encased by the tumour that doctors couldn't even see it. The tumour was wrapped around the gland ... when he started out his PSA was ... around 5,000 ... it eventually normalised ... and he is alive and well now..and I think his PSA count is like 3 or 4.
Richard M. Schulze
#61. Printer's ink, when it spells out a doctor's promise to cure, is one of the subtlest and most dangerous of poisons.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
#62. Is there no hope? the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
John Gay
#63. Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.
Ezekiel Emanuel
#64. The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.
Alastair Campbell
#65. The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
Paul Farmer
#66. In those days, Doc Susie used medications interchangeably between humans and animals. That was before pharmaceutical houses discovered a fundamental economic principle. Label a medication for human consumption, and a higher price could be charged.
Virginia Cornell
#67. The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.
He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.
Oscar Wilde
#68. 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
