medicine

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn__ dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it__ actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.

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.

[T]here are no illnesses in nature, only relationships. There are, of course, naturally occurring events, including infectious viruses, malignant growths, ruptures of tissues, and unusual chromosome constellations, but these are not ipso facto illnesses. Without the social meaning that humans attach to them they do not constitute illness or disease: The fracture of a septuagenarian's femur has, within the world of nature, so more significance than the snapping of an autumn leaf from its twig; and the invasion of a human organism by cholera germs carries with it no more the stamp of "illness" than the souring of milk by other forms of bacteria. (Sedgwick, 1972, p. 211)

The apothecary__ name was Owlglass. He hummed to himself as he worked in his back room. He__ found a new type of blue fluff, which he was grinding down. It was probably good for curing something. He__ have to try it out on people until he found out what.

I have done so much medical and scientific research Crashing Life I am thinking about putting PhD behind my name or maybe B.S.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions.

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!

Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system

To confront death every day, to see it for yourself, you have to love the living

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?The patients get better and leave.

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field__nternal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone

Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.

Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, __h, he has autism. That__ the problem___nd then he didn__ treat the GI problem.

Primum non nocere, 'First, don't make things worse,' was an essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortunately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modern medicine aims at getting rid of patients' symptoms. Little, if any consideration is given to the fact that some of these symptoms may actually be used by the body in an attempt to correct deeper disorders. When this is the case, suppressing the symptom does not necessarily help the patient.

It just shows you that if you take a plain, ordinary, moronic intern and make him do the same things over and over again until he loses is mind, you can teach him to do almost anything. I think now that I've mastered IVs, I might take up neurosurgery in my spare time.

But at the most basic level, doctors need to be able to come forward with their errors and near-misses, otherwise we will never know where the problems lay.