Quotes & Sayings About Medical Profession

Sometimes they almost made me feel glad that I had a few extra years to play my depression out with therapy and other means, because I think its useful in youth- unless suicide or drug abuse are the alternatives- to have some faith in the mind to cure itself, to not rush to doctors or diagnosis's ... I sometimes worry that part of what creates depression in young people is their own, and their parents, and the whole worlds impatience with allowing the phases of life to run their course. We will very likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgment and labeling do not slow down a bit. Somewhere between the unbelievable tardiness that the medical profession was guilty of in administering proper treatment to me and the eagerness to with which practitioners prescribe Ritalin for 8 year old boys and Paxil for 14 year old girls, there is a sane course of action. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Adiation ... the biggest lobby ... in the world. It's involved in university research ... industries ... the whole medical profession.., the whole military establishment, and the economic and military policy of the country depends on people being willing to handle radio-active materials. — Rosalie Bertell

In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge. — Honore De Balzac

In the actual condition of medical science, the physician mostly plays the part of simple spectator of the sad episodes which his profession furnishes him. — Francois Magendie

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine. — Gerald F. Lieberman

One of the most dangerous and best-kept secrets of the medical profession is the epidemic of anesthesiologists who are addicted to their own drugs. — Christopher McDougall

Nothing in medical literature today communicates the idea that women's bodies are well-designed for birth. Ignorance of the capacities of women's bodies can flourish and quickly spread into the popular culture when the medical profession is unable to distinguish between ancient wisdom and superstitious belief. — Ina May Gaskin

It never occurred to them that God may have provided the world with a vast array of very brainy medical types for the very reason of solving problems such as theirs. However, there is one thing that the medical profession cannot do and that is save people from being idiots. — Craig Ferguson

The medical profession has good reason to be alarmed by the inroads made in its work by irregular, unorthodox systems, schools and cults of treating human ailments; but instead of raging at the audacious presumption of these interlopers, would it not be better to inquire if there is not some reason for the astonishing spread and popularity of these therapeutic innovations? — Henry Lindlahr

This was the age of the industrial revolution, science was becoming the new religion and it was therefore natural that large numbers of the medical profession firmly believed in a mechanistic explanation for madness... Insanity was a disease and thus naturally something that doctors alone were qualified to treat. — Neil Evans

Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things. — Lewis Hyde

Of course, to speak of the dark night of the soul is anathema to many in the psychiatric field. I was told by one of my psychiatrists over the years not to equate depression with any religious experience such as the dark night of the soul. I never asked him why; I just assumed that he didn't want religious language to be mixed with medical. I did try to tell him, however, that religious language covers all and every aspect of being, that I could not simply separate it from his profession's language and concepts. He looked disgusted. — Kathryn Greene-McCreight

An intelligent person may be wrong sometimes, but a fool is never wrong. The medical profession is never wrong. — Herbert M. Shelton

I had a home birth because I really believe in the body's natural ability to give birth. The medical profession has kind of warped women's minds into thinking we don't know how to birth and we need doctors and epidurals and Pitocin. — Sarah Shahi

WITCHES LIVED AND WERE BURNED LONG BEFORE the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man's suppression of women as healers. The other side of the suppression of witches as healers was the creation of a new male medical profession, under the protection and patronage of the ruling classes. This new European medical profession played an important role in the witch hunts, supporting the witches' persecutors with "medical" reasoning: — Barbara Ehrenreich

Look at him! That's life, according to the medical profession. Isn't life wonderful? — Kurt Vonnegut

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions. — Florence Nightingale

These human experiments have gone largely unchallenged and unquestioned by Congress, the medical profession, and the scientific community at large. — Ted Gup

Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. — Neil Gaiman

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases. — Charles Jencks

I had parents who believed I could do anything - and I know how that made me feel. I think both my parents, having careers in the medical profession, feel they are helping people on a daily basis, and that was inculcated in me as a value. I had to struggle with giving up the idea of becoming a doctor myself. — Reese Witherspoon

The pharmaceutical corporations are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession, country by country — John Le Carre

Responsibility for the unethical experimentation lies first with the individual doctors, but also collectively with the medical profession as a whole, and with academia as a whole. — Colin A. Ross

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room. — Terry Pratchett

The medical profession and the leading academic institutions where mind control research was done have not yet provided a meaningful public accounting, financial or ethical, of this experimentation. — Colin A. Ross

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death. — Jack Kevorkian

Women have suffered too much from the Conspiracy of Silence to allow that conspiracy to last one minute longer. It has been an established and admitted rule in the medical profession to keep a wife in ignorance of the fact that she has become the victim of venereal disease. — Christabel Pankhurst

Now if you want to look to the medical profession for a true hard bastard, there is none harder, in my opinion, than the man I will now name. I mean, 99.9 per cent of doctors would want to protect their pension and keep in with the in-crowd, not, though, this man amongst men. The star witness against the screws from Barlinnie was Doctor Simon Danson. — Stephen Richards

The efforts of the medical profession in the US to control: ... its ... job it proposes to monopolize. It has been carrying on a vigorous campaign all over the country against new methods and schools of healing because it wants the business ... I have watched this medical profession for a long time and it bears watching. — Clarence Darrow

But in the early 1900s, the medical profession began to promote the health benefits of tanning. Workers were increasingly moving into factories where complexions grew pallid, as the upper classes spent more time outside playing sports. — Anonymous

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too. — George Eliot

Instead the attitude of the medical profession has been that miracle cures are nonexistent, that the disease of which a person was cured did not exist in the first place, either because it was an imaginary disorder, such as a hysterical conversion reaction, or else because it was a misdiagnosis. Fortunately, however, a few serious scientists, physicians and religious truth-seekers are currently in the process of beginning to examine the nature of such phenomena as spontaneous remissions in cancer patients and apparently successful examples of psychic healing. Fifteen — M. Scott Peck

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school. — Tess Gerritsen

Equally worrying, and far less recognized, medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible for - or to apply the knowledge we have about how to make old age better. Although the elderly population is growing rapidly, the number of certified geriatricians the medical profession has put in practice has actually fallen in the United States by 25 percent between 1996 and 2010. Applications to training programs in adult primary care medicine have plummeted, while fields like plastic surgery and radiology receive applications in record numbers. Partly, this has to do with money - incomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine. And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly. — Atul Gawande

I was recently inside a hospital that had gone wireless and it was a forest of microwave antennas! It is sad that the medical profession is in the process of becoming expert on microwave radiation sickness due to willfully inducing it into their own staff! — Steven Magee

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist. — Margaret Heffernan

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure. — Anna Quindlen

Several years ago, I realized that I didn't want to spend all my life in medicine. It had me in a sort of spiritual box, like a plant whose roots are getting crowded. I felt I wasn't growing. So I promised myself that I would quit while I still had the energy to get involved in something new. There's nothing wrong with medicine. There's more paperwork, more lawsuits, less understanding between doctors and patients. But it's still a great business. But not for me - not any longer. — Richard S. Weeder

The medical profession (is) a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity ... (U)ntil there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it. — George Bernard Shaw

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. — Elyn R. Saks

There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country's first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device. — Russell Shorto

It must be frustrating to survive the gauntlet that is our western medical schooling system only to one day come to the realization that you have been taught only to manage illness and disease instead of curing it. — Gary Hopkins

Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending? — Marcia Angell

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better ... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. — Michael Pollan

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

There is a saying in the medical profession 'Inside every
tablet is a little bit of poison'. Avoid medications if you can. — Steven Magee

With the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which, considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

In selling his scheme, Obama has been promoting the myth that our system is no better than those of other advanced nations. His recent statements have betrayed his openly contemptuous attitude toward American health care and out top-flight medical profession. His attitude is consistent with his revealed general attitude about America, which he denigrates every time he gets a chance, especially on foreign soil. — David Limbaugh

When I was contemplating medical school after graduating from Knox, several people suggested that nursing was a more suitable profession for women. My own mother discouraged me from becoming a doctor. But this is not why I became a nurse instead! — Mary Pope Osborne

It's great to be excited by your profession, whether you are a doctor or a writer. I started writing books when I was in medical school and, by the time I graduated, I realized that writing was more exciting to me than being a doctor. And if I tried to be a doctor and a writer, then both would suffer. — Sergei Lukyanenko

The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. — Sigmund Freud

It's not beyond the possibility that there still could be a YES in 200 years' time ... of course with different members, unless the medical profession comes up with something extraordinary. — Chris Squire

Electricity should not be banned, it just needs much better government regulation and understanding by the medical profession of the full range of toxicity that it presents to the human. — Steven Magee

When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies. — Walter Russell

The FDA and much, but not all, of the orthodox medical profession are actively hostile against vitamins and minerals ... They are out to get the health food industry ... And they are trying to do this out of active hostility and prejudice. — William Proxmire

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help?
However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder
in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. — Thomas Szasz

A medical profession founded on callousness to the pain of the other animals may eventually destroy its own sensibility to the pain of humans. — Brigid Brophy

My parents had chosen the medical profession for me. I even studied a few semesters at St Xavier's College, but at the back of my mind, I always wanted to be a musician like my father. — Zubin Mehta

I had a sense of debt to the medical profession and to surgery particularly. I would not be as ambient as I am without it. — Jeffrey Tate

By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be "of Venus" ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can't blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Patient autonomy is paramount to the oath that we take when we enter the profession of medicine. That is why I am appalled when the federal government gets between my patients and their right to the full range of medical information and complete access to health care. — Ami Bera

Do no harm isn't just for the medical profession. — Michael LaRocca

What is odd, perhaps, is how the primacy of patient autonomy and informed consent over efficacy - which is what we're talking about here - was presumed, but not actively discussed within the medical profession. Although the authoritative and paternalistic reassurance of the Victorian doctor who 'blinds with science' is a thing of the past in medicine, the success of the alternative therapy movement - whose practitioners mislead, mystify and blind their patients with sciencey-sounding 'authoritative' explanations, like the most patronising Victorian doctor imaginable - suggests that there may still be a market for that kind of approach. — Ben Goldacre

We're all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we're still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession. — Eric Topol

When I was born in 1970 with a rare genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED), medical science wasn't what it is today and my mum and dad were treated terribly by the medical profession. — Warwick Davis

The incredible benefits of practising and applying mindfulness and self-compassion in the workplace are being increasingly recognised by human resource professionals as well as the medical profession, as the stresses of competing in today's global economy take their toll on the mental health and emotional wellbeing of many otherwise talented and enthusiastic individuals in the workplace. — Christopher Dines

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours. — Lionel Shriver

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings. — Sheila Jeffreys

Education continued to come under particularly strong fire ... : If women learned how to manage in the world as well as men, if they learned about history and politics and studied for a profession, of course they would soon be demanding a voice and a role outside the home. The medical doctors soon discovered that education was dangerous to a female's health. — Lillian Faderman

Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession. — Anthony Trollope

The Study proves that such experiments resulted in serious damage to study subjects and their children. Finally, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study proves that considerable external pressure is often required before the medical profession takes the necessary action to terminate such experimentation. — Colin A. Ross

Yet the denial of feelings is one way of blocking the chronic depression that can descend like a dense fog on those who deal day after day with sickness and death. It is better than not caring at all, better than burning out. Only a few are tough enough to maintain both equanimity and caring for a lifetime; these renowned nurses and legendary physicians are saints of the medical profession. Copper knew a few of them, and he wished he could be more like them. It took a lot of growing up. — Richard S. Weeder

Wine is a much better salve than anything the medical profession has ever prescribed. Even the Bible condones it! — Jonathan Evison

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood. — Akhil Sharma

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised. — Colin Firth

Of course, the medical profession doesn't like D.I.Y. anything. — Eric Topol

Nothing is known in our profession by guess; and I do not believe, that from the first dawn of medical science to the present moment, a single correct idea has ever emanated from conjecture: it is right therefore, that those who are studying their profession should be aware that there is no short road to knowledge; and that observation on the diseased living, examination of the dead, and experiments upon living animals, are the only sources of true knowledge; and that inductions from these are the sole bases of legitimate theory. — Astley Cooper

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. — Adrienne Rich

The death toll from health care screwups adds up to at least 500,000 Americans annually. That is the equivalent of more than three jumbo jets crashing every day of the year (or over 1,000 jets annually). Because these individuals are dying at home, in hospitals, or in nursing homes, no one is counting the bodies. There is no outrage, no plan to change a system that allows too many to die unnecessarily. The medical profession seems largely immune to the consequences of its errors. — Joe Graedon

The word smart is not applied to all professions, even if you are smart in that profession. No one talks about smart lawyers. They may say a brilliant lawyer. They'll talk about a creative artist. Smart is saved for scientists. It just is. It's not even really applied to medical doctors. It applies to scientists in the lab figuring out what hadn't been figured out before. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. — Marcia Angell

Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises. — Margaret Sanger

No one knows our bodies or our subjective experiences like we do. This means we can rest secure in our knowledge of ourselves and what we're going through, even when the medical profession doesn't understand or believe us. Migraine is a weird and changing disease. It affects all of us differently, and every attack is a little different than the one before. This means that no one can understand your life, symptoms, or illness like you can. This can be incredibly empowering: you are the expert. But, it also carries great responsibility: to live as happily and as fully as possible, you must listen to your body and trust your instincts. — Sarah Hackley

I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race. — J.G. Ballard

Our aim for ever must be the pursuit of the knowledge of Man in his entirety. To study the flesh, the skin, the bones, the organs, the nerves of Man, is to equip our minds with a knowledge that will enable us to search beyond the body. The noble profession at whose threshold you stand as neophytes is not an end in itself. The science of Anatomy contributes to the great sum of all Knowledge, which is the Truth: the whole Truth of the Life of Man upon this turning earth. And so: Observe precisely. Record exactly. Neglect nothing. Fear no foe. Never swerve from your purpose. Pay no heed to Safety.
For I believe that all men can be happy and that the good life can be led upon this earth.
I believe that all men must work towards that end.
And I believe that that end justifies any means ... .
Let no scruples stand in the way of the progress of medical science! — Dylan Thomas

The individual who violates the rules in a zealous search for an answer to the problem may overstep the bounds and thereby suffer the loss of his relationships to the organized medical profession. — Morris Fishbein

First, it must be a pleasure to study the human body the most miraculous masterpiece of nature and to learn about the smallest vessel and the smallest fiber. But second and most important, the medical profession gives the opportunity to alleviate the troubles of the body, to ease the pain, to console a person who is in distress, and to lighten the hour of death of many a sufferer. — Rudolf Virchow

Benedict (Cumberbatch, who is playing Sherlock) looks amazing. He's still got a Sherlockian silhouette, with a large overcoat, but in a classic cut. Watson dresses with an urban elegance, a touch of old school dashing, giving a feeling of both the military and medical profession. I suppose it's something they have in common as well. They're a bit metrosexual. — Martin Freeman

The whole thrust of science and the medical profession is to try and prevent it from happening, to try to prolong life, to keep you from dying, to keep you from getting older, to rejuvenate you. I mean, that's everybody's wish. The fountain of youth is everybody's sought-after thing. — Woody Allen

Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. — Randolph M. Nesse

Enough of medical ethics. Let Uncle
Hippocrates rest in peace. It's time to send an S.O.S to Uncle Omar Khayyam instead. — Anurag Shourie

The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge. — John Steinbeck

The interaction with the unaccountable, self-regulating business called "modern medicine" is analogous to buying a used car from a stranger: you never really know what you're getting because of the things you're not being told. And what is not being disclosed can (seriously) hurt you.
(in "The Mammogram Myth: The Independent Investigation Of Mammography The Medical Profession Doesn't Want You To Know About", 2013) — Rolf Hefti

Wow! tarnished drew me right into the diabolical world of Dale and Isabel. They are two of the most coldblooded killers the medical profession may have ever produced. --- Valerie Graves of New York - an Internationally known Advertising and Marketing Executive who also was creative consultant for the '92 Clinton/Gore campaign — Willie Stewart

Thus, for 3,000 years and more, this disease has been known to the medical profession. And for 3,000 years and more, humanity has been knocking at the door of the medical profession for a "cure." - Fortune, March 1937 — Siddhartha Mukherjee