Joel Fuhrman Quotes

What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.

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?

I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy.

How can we keep people healthy, and if they get sick, how can we treat them right the first time?

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

You need to make sure everyone is healthy first and foremost.

You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.

The best way to reduce the cost of medical care is to reduce the illness.

Each and every day health centers provide high-quality primary and preventive care to our constituents.

I love the opportunity to help my patients, to work with them to find the best course of action to get them healthy and to give them the information they need to stay healthy.

Health is more than the absence of disease…It is also education….We have a health illiterate society.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

The Medical Society of Sedgwick County, the Kansas Hospital Association and doctors have really done some remarkable work on wellness-related issues.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

Every year, my mom makes sure I have my checkups and everything, which is probably a really good idea. She's great with all that health stuff.

Encouraging wellness and prevention helps improve quality of life and can lower costs, too. I saw too many patients who had poor health because of their decisions, but too often, all they needed was a doctor to help point them in the right direction.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

The surgeon general is responsible for sharing scientifically-based information with the public so that they can improve their health. But I will say personally that my goal as surgeon general is to help build a culture of prevention in America so that we are a nation that is as good at preventing illness as we are at treating it.

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.

Let's face it, in America today we don't have a health care system, we have a sick care system. We wait until people become obese, develop chronic diseases, or become disabled - and then we spend untold hundreds of billions annually to try to make them better.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.

Health is already a dominant sector in most societies and the one most guaranteed to grow.

When I jump into something, I really do it to the fullest extent that my time and energy will allow me. I'm from Texas, and to see so many people that are obese and with disorders that are preventable. They haven't been shown or told. I'm really passionate about making sure my fellow countrymen are healthy. It's a shame.

As a practicing neurologist, I place central importance in applying current science to the notion of disease prevention.

What I think a doctor should do is prevent disease, by any means necessary.