Quotes About Medicine Doctors

#1. 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

#2. The best doctor gives the least medicines.

Benjamin Franklin

#3. Medicines cure diseases, but only doctors can cure patients.

Carl Jung

#4. Doctors said 'go home and enjoy what little is left of your life'. He recovered.

Richard M. Schulze

#5. 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

#6. A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

Mark Twain

#7. 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

#8. We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil ... Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place.

Mahatma Gandhi

#9. I shall tell my doctors baseball has more curative powers than all their medicine.

Herbert Hoover

#10. 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.

Suzy Kassem

#11. Before you diagnose any sickness, make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart. For the emotions in a man's moon or sun, can point to the sickness in any one of his other parts.

Suzy Kassem

#12. 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

#13. Do what is right, and do it now.

Atul Gawande

#14. But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors? Don't make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don't get a dime.

Rebecca Skloot

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. The best doctors give the least medicines

Benjamin

#18. The scrub sink ... is the place where doctors wash their hands after they operate so that they won't get flecks of your vital organs on their Lexus upholstery.

Dave Barry

#19. Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

George Bernard Shaw

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.

Alastair Campbell

#23. Doctors is all swabs.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#24. 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

#25. Medicine is aptly described as an art, not a science. To this end, four different doctors may have up to four different diagnoses or prescriptions.

Andrew Saul

#26. Medicine's a funny business. After all, dispensing chemicals is considered mainstream and diet and nutrition is considered alternative.

Charles F. Glassman

#27. 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#29. At 3, I played an innocent game of doctor, minus the stethoscope and medicine bag.

Pattie Mallette

#30. For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Marcel Proust

#31. No doctor knows everything. There's a reason why it's called "practising" medicine.

Anonymous

#32. 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.

Suzy Kassem

#33. The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself.

James B. Herrick

#34. I'm a sex addict. It's my cross to bear. It's a real disease with doctors and medicine and everything!

Will Ferrell

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. In my experience, if you go to a hospital for any reason whatsoever, including to read the gas meter, they give you a tetanus shot.

Dave Barry

#38. 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

#39. I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.

Abraham Verghese

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Doctors try to get rid of their patients - clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.

Alan W. Watts

#44. 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

#45. I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.

Voltaire

#46. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. I

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#47. Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.

Sol Luckman

#48. Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.

Jay Leno

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Sometimes sports can provide a medicine that no doctor can provide.

Skip Bertman

#55. Man is not made for space. But with the help of biologists and medical doctors, he can be prepared and accommodated.

Wernher Von Braun

#56. The way most doctors practice medicine right now isn't working.

Mark Hyman

#57. Most allopathic doctors think practitioners of alternative medicine are all quacks. They're not. Often they're sharp people who think differently about disease.

Mehmet Oz

#58. People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt.

Seneca The Younger

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

Leo Tolstoy

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.

R.D. Laing

#63. 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

#64. Doctors should first understand the cause of disease, then treat it with diet. Medicine should only be used if diet fails

Sun Simiao

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

Chuck Palahniuk

#66. I think that the practice of medicine, the science of it, has become 50% pharmacological, so that doctors are like walking pharmacies.

Caroline Myss

#67. 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

#68. Medicine is intention. Those who are proficient at using intention are good doctors.

Sun Simiao

#69. 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

#70. There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.

Edward E. Rosenbaum

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Not one amongst the doctors, as you'll see
For his own friends desires to prescribe.

Philemon

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. Doubt is an old disease.
Faith is an old medicine.
Compassion is an old doctor.
Concern is an old nurse.

Sri Chinmoy

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. It's actually the spirit helping the spirit; it is the doctor, the bed, the potion.

Franz Grillparzer

#82. No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

#83. 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

#84. Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice"?

George Carlin

#85. Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

Peter Schiff

#86. A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian - solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It's what doctors most love to do.

Lisa Sanders

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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.

Kurt Vonnegut

#91. There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#92. 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

#93. Why do they call it proctology? Is it because analogy was already taken?

Aristotle.

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. Acknowledging the important role of the emotions in health and illness, medicine must reexamine its concepts of disease causation.

John E. Sarno

#97. if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors?

Rebecca Skloot

#98. Is there a medical rule that requires doctors-office personnel to treat you as though you have the IQ of a Cheeto?

Dave Barry

#99. Perhaps this is the solution to medicine's midlife crisis, too: doctors focusing on their noble craft, their relationships with patients, the stuff over which we have some control. Ultimately, this may be the best hope for our professional salvation.

Sandeep Jauhar

#100. When we are trying to come up with new health laws, you bring doctors, you bring experts in medicine. In urban planning, you bring the best architects. How it is possible that when we are talking about the way we are going to feed America, no chef shows up in the room?

Jose Andres