Practice Of Medicine Quotes & Sayings

I think energy medicine is a field that is probably for me the most authentic level of medicine that there is, because it takes into account what I would call 'square one of creation'. Which is where energy meets the process of incarnating. So I think it is very much going to become the dominant practice of medicine in this next millennium. We have no other place to go but there. — Caroline Myss

We know from our clinical experience in the practice of medicine that in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the individual and his background of heredity are just as important, if not more so, as the disease itself. — Paul Dudley White

We profess to teach the principles and practice of medicine, or, in other words, the science and art of medicine. Science is knowledge reduced to principles; art is knowledge reduced to practice. The knowing and doing, however, are distinct ... Your knowledge, therefore, is useless unless you cultivate the art of healing. Unfortunately, the scientific man very often has the least amount of art, and he is totally unsuccessful in practice; and, on the other hand, there may be much art based on an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, and yet it is sufficient to make its cultivator eminent. — Samuel Wilks

The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish. — William Osler

We ought to observe that practice which is the hardest of all-especially for young physicians-we ought to throw in no medicine at all-to abstain-to observe a wise and masterly inactivity. — John Randolph Of Roanoke

The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise. — Thomas Sydenham

The theory of medicine, therefore, presents what is useful in thought, but does not indicate how it is to be applied in practice-the mode of operation of these principles. The theory, when mastered, gives us a certain kind of knowledge. Thus we say, for example, there are three forms of fevers and nine constitutions. The practice of medicine is not the work which the physician carries out, but is that branch of medical knowledge which, when acquired, enables one to form an opinion upon which to base the proper plan of treatment. — Avicenna

Were I disposed to consider the comparative merit of each of them [facts or theories in medical practice], I should derive most of the evils of medicine from supposed facts, and ascribe all the remedies which have been uniformly and extensively useful, to such theories as are true. Facts are combined and rendered useful only by means of theories, and the more disposed men are to reason, the more minute and extensive they become in their observations — Benjamin Rush

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body: The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. — Robert Wachter

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.) — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The state of healthcare today is that we are busy in the practice of medicine vs. being in the science of medicine. — Vinod Khosla

Imagine looking back from a vantage point of one thousand years in the future, retrospectively evaluating our current, "sophisticated" medical and scientific procedures. One might see today's physician waving laser beams over a patient's body as a primitive, archaic, and incomprehensible healing technique, just as from some perspectives a medicine woman waving eagle feathers, or a curandera holding a crucifix over a patient, is viewed by some as archaic. The similarities are striking and compelling. Future generations may lose touch with the major assumptions underpinning contemporary western medicine, just as many of us have now lost touch with the assumptions integral to older cultures that continue to practice the ancient healing ways. Forgetting the assumptions on which a procedure is based may make the procedure incomprehensible, but it does not make it invalid. — H. Henrietta Stockel

I have come to believe that energy medicine is a practice of healing that is dependent upon the energy of time. Whereas allopathic medicine uses linear time as a fundamental healing measure. Energy medicine needs to understand the dynamic of chiros time, that is the time without time. — Caroline Myss

In the last century the practice of medicine has become no more than an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry and the other aspects of the huge, powerful and immensely profitable health care industry. Medicine is no longer an independent profession. Doctors have become nothing more than a link connecting the pharmaceutical industry to the consumer. — Vernon Coleman

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,

What is rational in the practice of thoughtful medicine is impractical for the system. — Melissa Cady

Science of yoga and ayurveda is subtler than the science of medicine, because science of medicine is often victim of statistical manipulation. — Amit Ray

Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about. — Barney Frank

Few things a doctor does are more important than relieving pain ... pain is soul destroying. No patient should have to endure intense pain unnecessarily. The quality of mercy is essential to the practice of medicine; here, of all places, it should not be strained. — Marcia Angell

The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin goes all the way back to the origins of medicine. For most of its history, the practice was not separated from other aspects of human activity. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Since the most ancient times, all men, and particularly those who endeavored in the practice of medicine, have brought closer together two natural phenomena of capital importance: illness or fever and fermentation. — Louis Pasteur

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

When, as today, there is a market in human organs, when fetuses are produced to make spare organs available, or to make progress in research and preventive medicine, many regard the human content of these practices as implicit. But the contempt for man that underlies it, when man is used and abused, leads
like it or not
to a descent into hell. — Pope Benedict XVI

Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts. — Hippocrates

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrait of the practice of medicine everywhere. The special conditions that prevail in the countryside as opposed to the cities are examined, and each of these is illustrated by a case history that is as compelling as it is informative. It is presented in a highly readable form that would be accessible to the general public as well as to the deliverers of health care. I recommend it most highly. — Richard Selzer

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

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

Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice". — David Stewart

The pressures of the current neoliberal capitalist system of health care and its financing force health professionals into a double bind. Either they spend the time and energy necessary to listen to and fully treat the patient and put their job and clinic in economic jeopardy, or they move at a frenetic pace to keep their practice afloat and only partially attend to the patient in their presence. — Seth Holmes

I've found that techniques and practices of energy medicine offer healings that are often quicker, safer, and more effective than many better known healing practices. — Jed Diamond

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. — Joseph Priestley

Carl von Rokitansky is one of the founders of scientific medicine and systematized it, looking at what the clinical symptoms mean. The medicine we practice today, which is infinitely more sophisticated, is Rokitansky's medicine. — Eric Kandel

[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests. — Richard Dawkins

Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath; that's the essence of yoga, too. So, I consciously began using yoga techniques in my practice and playing. I think yoga helped reduce the number and severity of injuries I suffered. As preventative medicine, it's unequaled. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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

Well, I've seen a bunch of acupuncturists and one of my sister-in-laws is an herbalist. So I know a lot about alternative medicine. I don't know a lot about the practice but I know about the world. — Tim Daly

Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine. — Randolph M. Nesse

As a doctor, as well as a mother and a world citizen, I wish to practice the ultimate form of preventive medicine by ridding the earth of these technologies that propagate disease, suffering, and death. — Helen Caldicott

Call me a nature nut. I love nature. I like to walk in nature, I use natural remedies, and I practice natural medicine as a naturopathic doctor in Los Angeles. - Willow McQuade, ND star of Death Drops: A Natural Remedies Mystery. — Chrystle Fiedler

If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense. Natural — J. Budziszewski

A beautiful literary collection that tells of today's country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations. At times, with today's advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America's cities, but the variety of practices is enormous. The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice. — Abraham Verghese

Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease. — William Harvey

The 'regular' school of medicine, as a body, has ignored and will ignore this science, because it discloses the fallacy of their favorite theories and practices and because it reveals unmistakably the direful results of chronic drug poisoning and ill-advised operations. — Henry Lindlahr

Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years — Yehudi Menuhin

A spiritual retreat is medicine for soul starvation. Through silence, solitary practice, and simple living, we begin to fill the empty reservoir. This lifts the veils, dissolves the masks, and creates space within for the feelings of forgiveness, compassion, and loving kindness that are so often blocked. — David A. Cooper

It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice. — William Osler

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's. — Martin H. Fischer

Far from the cinematic drama of hospital emergency rooms, Slow Medicine embraces the unsung work of daily attention that is the greatest need and firmest foundation for longevity and quality of life at the farthest reach of age. Excellent chronic care attends to the day-to-day needs and conditions of the patient - by offering emotional support and social stimulation, supplying better nutrition, easing chronic skin and nail conditions, and making sleeping, moving, bathing, dressing, and voiding easier. Slow Medicine is the careful practice that most reliably sustains fragile patterns of well-being. This foundation for better elder care strengthens, rather than replaces, the selective use of high-tech care. During the time of the writing of this book, I have lived the — Dennis Mccullough

Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere. — William Osler

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.
William Carlos Williams, c. 1931 — William Carlos Williams

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century's end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice - pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. In recent years, though, even this level of preparation has not been enough for the new complexity of medicine. — Atul Gawande

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of 'normality'. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud's own views on 'normality' are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud's work showed, scandalously, just how 'plastic' and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual 'norm'; but this is in no sense given by Nature. — Terry Eagleton

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.
who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good
approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case. — David Foster Wallace

A barbarous practice, the inconsistency, folly, and injury of which no words can sufficiently describe.

[Condemning the use of mercurial medicines.] — Thomas Graham

It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Nearly every business collects metrics on inventory, sales, and workplace process. Health care has been slow to measure these kinds of outcomes. Increasingly, general medicine, via either managed care or large practice settings, is improving by collecting data through electronic records and refining practice based on what works. — Thomas R. Insel

The practice of medicine will be very much as you make it - to one a worry, a care, a perpetual annoyance; to another, a daily job and a life of as much happiness and usefulness as can well fall to the lot of man, because it is a life of self-sacrifice and of countless opportunities to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those that fall. — William Osler

America with 4% of the world's population has 50% of the worlds lawyers ... tort lawyers love to point out that 1% of America's health care cost is used to pay malpractice insurance ... but most doctors practice defensive medicine to avoid malpractice litigation ... these costs are not included in the 1% number above. — Richard Lamm

Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice. — Ben Goldacre

People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt. — Seneca The Younger