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Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.

The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts.

Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.

Increasingly we know that we're going to have multiple medical conditions, and the person who's got the greatest incentive to manage those conditions is the patient him or herself.

Anytime you interfere with a natural process, you're playing God. God determines what happens naturally. That means when a person's ill, he shouldn't go to a doctor because he's asking for interference with God's will. But of course, patients can't think that way.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

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

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

How can you regret helping a suffering patient?

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.