Medical Complexity Quotes

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.

The forms of diseases are many and the healing of them is manifold.

Did you know that it's a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending.

...all the most acute, most powerful, and most deadly diseases, and those which are most difficult to be understood by the inexperienced, fall upon the brain.

There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

As theories increased, simple medicines..were forgotten, at least in the politer nations. ...Medical books, were immensely multiplied,...(towards) an abstruse science, quite out of reach of ordinary men.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

Students who have attended my [medical] lectures may remember that I try not only to teach them what we know, but also to realise how little this is: in every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

Many dishes many diseases, Many medicines few cures.

We look at science as the ultimate answer for everything yet we are really messy organisms and when the two collide in the upper echelons of medicine you think science will prevail but it's not always that way.

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

Part of my training was learning how to refer patients to cardiologists for heart problems, gastroenterologists for stomach issues, and rheumatologists for joint pain. Given that most physicians were trained this way, it's no wonder that the average Medicare patient has six doctors and is on five different medications.

Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

I feel very blessed to have been involved with some of the most complex surgical procedures in the history of the world.