I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

It is certainly important to be looking for cures to medical disorders, but it is equally important to conduct research on human health and well-being.

The Internet ethos of diversity and competition runs exactly counter to uniform, gatekeeper-oriented medical culture - the technocratic philosophy of the 'one best way' embodied in our pharmaceutical regulations. On the Net, medical information is abundant, and pharmacies, domestic and foreign, operate on many different models.

Health care's like any other product or service: if the consumer is in charge of spending his money on it, then the market will make sure that it is affordable.

Health care needs are paramount after a disaster, and medical personnel fight against time to reach and assist victims.

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

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

Increasingly we know that we're going to have multiple medical conditions, and the person who's got the greatest incentive to manage those conditions is the patient him or herself.

In the future, it's going to become more and more impossible for the economy to support how expensive medical care is and the number of sick people we have. Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.

Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.

Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.

Medical care is one of the only sectors in which Americans are asked to make significant, long-term decisions without knowing the exact price of those decisions up front. Americans deserve to make informed decisions about their medical options.

Pharmaceuticals have become an increasingly important part of modern medicine, and our seniors shouldn't have to worry about whether they can afford the medicines they need to stay healthy and maintain their independence.

When medical students focus on helping others, they're able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.

Right now, doctors can test for about 2,500 medical conditions, but they only can treat about 500 of those. So what do you do with the knowledge about the others?

Whether it's by helping us search for health-related information, connecting us with doctors through online portals, or enabling us to store and retrieve our medical records online, the Internet is starting to show the promise it has to transform the way people interact with and improve their own health and wellness.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

In many ways, human health is the great global connector.

The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

I'm a big believer in what's called personalized medicine, which refers to customizing your health care to your specific needs based on your physiology, genetics, value system and unique conditions.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

From cell phones to computers, quality is improving and costs are shrinking as companies fight to offer the public the best product at the best price. But this philosophy is sadly missing from our health-care insurance system.

I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency.

At medical centers such as the Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente, teams of doctors and nurses provide coordinated care while working for salary instead of getting paid for every procedure.

The truth is that the greatest innovations in health-care delivery haven't come from federally contrived oligopolies or enormous hospital chains. Novel concepts - whether practice-management companies, home health care or the first for-profit HMO - almost always have come from entrepreneurial firms, often backed by venture capital.

We're giving consumers the tools they need to see medical professionals virtually, to Skype with the doctor instead of wait in her office, to self-monitor vital signs, to connect with health-related communities, and to choose physicians based on reliable data about outcomes and cost.

The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.

One of the biggest challenges to medicine is the incorporation of information technology in our practices.

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Like education, healthcare also needs to be given importance.

Innovation, especially in America, is continuing at a breakneck pace, even in areas facing substantial political or regulatory headwinds. The advances in health care in particular are breathtaking - so many selfless souls are working to advance science, and this is heartening.

Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.

We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.

A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.

Health care has a lot of interesting machine-learning problems - outpatient outcomes, or when you have x-ray images and you want to predict things.

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.

Reimbursement is a major determinant of how medicine is practiced. When reimbursement changes, so do medical practice and medical education.

Developments in medical technology have long been confined to procedural or pharmaceutical advances, while neglecting a most basic and essential component of medicine: patient information management.

As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.

Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.

Effective use of technology is important to deliver healthcare. By leveraging technology, you can bring down lack of access and cost of healthcare.

My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

Food is the new health care.

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

Those who believe that health is a commodity, on par with cars or computers, fail to grasp the basic economic lesson that health is very vulnerable to exposure to the markets, not least due to the profound asymmetries in power between the providers and consumers.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.