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As I've met clinicians in my travels, time after time I've been inspired to hear why people went into medicine: to apply their way-above-average minds (and hearts) to work that's beyond most people's capacity, and perhaps save a few lives.

Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs.

Although I completed two years of internship in various small hospitals, I decided against continuing my medical training. I was much more fascinated by the unsolved problems of medicine than by practicing it.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.

My philosophy is my learning process. Until you die, you must evolve and improve.