Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

My father started growing very quiet as Alzheimer's started claiming more of him. The early stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest because that person is aware that they're losing awareness. And I think that that's why my father started growing more and more quiet.

No matter who you are, what you've accomplished, what your financial situation is - when you're dealing with a parent with Alzheimer's, you yourself feel helpless. The parent can't work, can't live alone, and is totally dependent, like a toddler. As the disease unfolds, you don't know what to expect.

When I told my doctor I couldn't afford an operation, he offered to touch-up my X-rays.

If you're so pro-life, do me a favour: don't lock arms and block medical clinics. If you're so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.

Cancer affects all of us, whether you're a daughter, mother, sister, friend, coworker, doctor, patient.

The greatest evil is physical pain.

Thinking of disease constantly will intensify it. Feel always 'I am healthily in body and mind'.

Honestly, being a doctor could make you more close minded than regular people.

Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

You can die of the cure before you die of the illness.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing.

I went to the doctor and he said I had acute appendicitis, and I said compared to who?

It would not be possible to praise nurses too highly.

Medical ethics is a fascinating discipline, as it deals with issues replete with complex philosophical, moral, and ethical considerations that are rarely black or white.

Any doctor will admit that any drug can have side effects, and that writing a prescription involves weighing the potential benefits against the risks.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.

I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care.

You may not be able to read a doctor's handwriting and prescription, but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten.

A pregnant woman facing the most dire circumstances must be able to count on her doctor to do what is medically necessary to protect her from serious physical harm.

I'm 86 and my doctor used to tell me to slow down - at least he did until he dropped dead.

I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.

I'm not feeling very well - I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.

The patient decides when it's best to go.

My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.

For too long nurses have been undervalued, restricted in what they could do, with too few career opportunities in clinical practice. For far too long, nurses have endured a pay system that has held them back - both professionally as well as financially.

The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy - to heal, as it is termed.

I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer but in the light.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

For the mind disturbed, the still beauty of dawn is nature's finest balm.

Nature can do more than physicians.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.

The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green.

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.

In terms of fitness and battling through cancer, exercise helps you stay strong physically and mentally.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

I'm wondering if they haven't reported all the people with MS, because if all of the cases were reported, the government would have to step in and give more financial aid to us.

Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said 'God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had a stroke on the plane. I said, if I have a stroke on a plane, I hope the pretend doctor isn't the one on the plane. I want a real doctor.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

I'm by no means condemning prescription medicine for mental health. I've seen it save a lot of people's lives.

Walking is man's best medicine.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Any man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

If I could time travel into the future, my first port of call would be the point where medical technology is at its best because, like most people on this planet, I have this aversion to dying.

Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.

Wellness is not a 'medical fix' but a way of living - a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit, an approach to life we each design to achieve our highest potential for well-being now and forever.

Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.

When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.

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.

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.

A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

A hospital is no place to be sick.

If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.

America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world.

Nurses serve their patients in the most important capacities. We know that they serve as our first lines of communication when something goes wrong or when we are concerned about health.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

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

Time is generally the best doctor.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.

There are some great questions to ask your doctor. If he says 'no,' then you find yourself a different doctor. There really has to be a change in how we medically look at women at this time. I mean, this is not just baby gloom.

Growing up, my dolls were doctors and on secret missions. I had Barbie Goes Rambo.

A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.

Medical liability reform is not a Republican or Democrat issue or even a doctor versus lawyer issue. It is a patient issue.

It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.

As a physician, I know many doctors want to utilize new technology, but they find the cost prohibitive.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.