The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them together into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if itβs contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people werenβt wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus βoutbreak,β there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, Γ©clairs are scarier than Ebola.
Suddenly, I was plunged back into an avid learning environment, starting at the bottom and working my way painstakingly up the mountain. The thrill of learning and accomplishing stimulated me so much that the work was pleasurable.
One of the most common and most dangerous misbeliefs is that it is impossible for someone to be stupid just because they are a doctor or a lawyer.
Absolutely everything undergoes evolvement - whether it's technology, journalism, the NFL, medicine.
An anthill increases by accumulation. Medicine is consumed by distribution. That which is feared lessens by association. This is the thing to understand.
Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
I'm thankful for the incredible advances in medicine that have taken place during my lifetime. I almost certainly wouldn't still be here if it weren't for them.
Modern medicine, for all its advances, knows less than 10 percent of what your body knows instinctively.
I'm the cofounder of Keep a Child Alive. We provide medicine for families affected by HIV and AIDS in places like Africa and India.
I confidently affirm that the greater part of those who are supposed to have died of gout, have died of the medicine rather than the disease - a statement in which I am supported by observation.
In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics.
This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.
Oh gosh, I'm completely allergic to historical dramas. Particularly those around the civil-rights movement. It's not my favorite thing to watch. So often they feel like medicine. Or not even a history lesson, because I really like history. Just... obligatory.
I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick.
If insurance companies paid for lifestyle-management classes, they would save huge sums of money. We need to see that alternative medicine is now mainstream.
Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.
With the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs, American taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill for medicine going to waste.