Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends.

The way most doctors practice medicine right now isn't working.

I want doctors to treat toward health and not treat toward disease.

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

If you really want people to remain healthy, you can't just throw pills at people once they become sick, which I feel like I was doing as a medical doctor, so I began working on more upstream thinking.

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen

I don't think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they're already sick and we don't deal with what's making them sick to start with, that's a real problem.

The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.

Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.

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

Preventive medicine isn't part of a physician's everyday routine, which is spent dispensing drugs and performing surgery.

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.

Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.

A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.

My job is to stay alive until the medicine and research catch up.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.

Progress of preventive medicine as a preservative, made more effective by the progress of reason and social order, will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses and those diseases in general that originate in climate, food, and the nature of work…a time will come when death would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of vitality….Cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?

Teaching people to eat doesn't make a lot of money. Nevertheless, most of us go into medicine because of a genuine desire to help people and optimize their health.

I feel like, with how medicine is evolving, something will be out there soon that can help you heal from arthritis. That might be what helps my longevity and pushes me to keep performing.

We who suffer from chronic Lyme can only ask for our loved ones to try to understand and be compassionate about this invisible disease.

Do I need to know about medicine to solve the health problem in Brazil? Do I need to know about agriculture to advance the agribusiness?

There is very little magic in the world of the chronically ill.