medical uncertainty Quotes

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

Towards the end of 2003 it was hard to get through training - and the darkest point was when a doctor told me there was a possibility I could end up in a wheelchair.

Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.

The doctors are always changing their opinions. They always have some new fad.

I had been feeling a little rum. I didn't think it was anything serious because years ago I felt a lump and it was benign. I assumed this would be too. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and I don't know what the future holds, if anything.

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.

It is true that some off-label drug use is based on very unsettled science and has more risks. But medicine - and not just cancer care - involves lots of hard choices. And the more serious the disorder, often the more likely it is that for every right and wrong treatment choice there are many other practical decisions painted in shades of gray.

Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.

The doctor told Phil, my then husband, that my condition was really bad news. They had found an artery tearing and said I could die. They said they could try to patch it up but it could go horribly wrong. It all turned out okay in the end but it was touch and go.

I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it but they did the best they could with what little they had.

Two weeks, maybe three. You never know with psychosomatic injuries You have to take your time with them.

Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate betrayal of the body when it rebels against itself. You always worry about charlatans. We found that specialists did not know as much as we thought.

You can believe the diagnosis, not the prognosis.

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

Even the best psychiatrist is like a blindfolded auto mechanic poking around under your hood with a giant foam "We're #1" finger.

It is very difficult to clinically diagnose someone who is dead.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.

One of the reasons surgeons have so much trouble separating Siamese twins is that nobody gets to do many of them. On the table, the anatomy is so different from normal, that you're constantly trying to figure out, 'Can I cut this? Does this wire lead to what?' It's like trying to defuse a bomb.

To be diagnosed was the hardest thing because I didn't know what they were talking about... And the doctor said, Don't worry, in three months you'll know. So I went about my business and then, one day, it jumped me. I couldn't get up... Your muscles trick you; they did me.

We do not know with any of these neuropsychiatric disorders what the ultimate basis is. Let's say you could find that too much of protein X was involved in schizophrenia. Would you then know what schizophrenia is? You would not.

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure

If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.