Posts tagged wisdom

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea,
but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
Sir William Osler
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.
Sir William Osler
The patient does not care about your science; what he wants to know is, can you cure him?
Martin H. Fischer
We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.
Albert Schweitzer (1931)
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
Harvey Cushing
The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
Alexander of Tralles
Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.
Martin Henry Fischer
It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
John Brown
Jay Parkinson, MD: As doctors, we have pills to treat infections and high cholesterol. We have scalpels to replace hips and open clogged arteries. But beyond pills and scalpels, what tools do we have? Walking out of the doctor’s office without a prescription is a rare occurrence these days. And the famous surgeon tagline has always been “a chance to cut is a chance to cure.” We see people when they’re sick and we’re trained and expected to do something. But do we want more than one of every five kids and nine of ten older Americans taking prescription drugs? Do we really think that more heart stents are the secret to longevity? Of course they are if we believe our job as physicians is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. Continue reading…

Jay Parkinson, MD:

As doctors, we have pills to treat infections and high cholesterol. We have scalpels to replace hips and open clogged arteries. But beyond pills and scalpels, what tools do we have? Walking out of the doctor’s office without a prescription is a rare occurrence these days. And the famous surgeon tagline has always been “a chance to cut is a chance to cure.” We see people when they’re sick and we’re trained and expected to do something. But do we want more than one of every five kids and nine of ten older Americans taking prescription drugs? Do we really think that more heart stents are the secret to longevity? Of course they are if we believe our job as physicians is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause.

Continue reading…