I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
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.
Socially, in most groups I tempered my conversations on my approach to health because those who entrusted their lives to allopathic, 'standard of care' Western doctors might not want to entertain the idea that they might have made the wrong choice or that their way wasn't the best way.
We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.
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.
The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.
Medicine is still all about treating populations, not people - one-size-fits all treatments and diagnoses.
I always think, medically... you really have to be your advocate. You have to be able to back up everything that you're feeling with some information and protect yourself through the world of hospitals and doctors' offices, so the more information the better.
I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.
I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.