Challenges in medicine are moving from 'Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire' to 'Can we preserve the house intact?'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?
Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody.
No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.
Medicine is a very tough thing. I mean, everyone is going to die. Sooner or later. That's a tough thing to face.
Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.
If we work so hard and put all the money in the hospital to buy medicine - it will be a disaster. Why we should work? So without a healthy environment of this Earth, no matter how much money you make, no matter how wonderful you are, you have a bad disaster.
In an era of unprecedented medical innovation, we have to do more to ensure that patients facing terminal illnesses have access to potentially life-saving treatments.
A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.