David Perlmutter Quotes

Preventive medicine isn't part of a physician's everyday routine, which is spent dispensing drugs and performing surgery.

I'm a preventative doctor.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.

The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

The best way to reduce the cost of medical care is to reduce the illness.

If insurance companies paid for lifestyle-management classes, they would save huge sums of money. We need to see that alternative medicine is now mainstream.

What I think a doctor should do is prevent disease, by any means necessary.

The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

The wellness and prevention market will outgrow the health care market.

Each and every day health centers provide high-quality primary and preventive care to our constituents.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.

The Medical Society of Sedgwick County, the Kansas Hospital Association and doctors have really done some remarkable work on wellness-related issues.

The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.

Concepts such as 'risk factor modification' and 'prevention' are often considered boring and they may not initiate or sustain the levels of motivation needed to make and maintain comprehensive lifestyle changes.

Meaningful health reform needs to provide incentives for physicians and other health professionals to teach their patients healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing primarily drugs and surgical interventions.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn't be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn't have to operate on them in the first place!

If you really want people to remain healthy, you can't just throw pills at people once they become sick, which I feel like I was doing as a medical doctor, so I began working on more upstream thinking.

The surgeon general is responsible for sharing scientifically-based information with the public so that they can improve their health. But I will say personally that my goal as surgeon general is to help build a culture of prevention in America so that we are a nation that is as good at preventing illness as we are at treating it.

Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen

You help someone's health, and you prevent them from infecting others.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...