Richard Dawkins Quotes

Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.

My father said, 'You should do 'A Day in the Life of Medicine.' A book about how the human race wants to heal itself in new ways.

The practice of physic [Medicine] is jostled by quacks on the one side, and by science on the other.

I look upon statistics as the handmaid of medicine, but on that very account I hold that it befits medicine to treat her handmaid with proper respect, and not to prostitute her services for controversial or personal purposes.

It is time for the scientific community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride There cannot be two kinds of medicine — conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

On the third stage is used for medicine, it is not known to the public.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.

We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.

If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have.

My job is to stay alive until the medicine and research catch up.

I have an obligation to use what I know to try to bring real, usable medical science to every doctor and bedside and patient.

Nature can do more than physicians.

St. Louis has always been a great center for medicine. It has been a leader in the nation since the early part of the 20th century. Along with that, we've been a leader in medical science and biomedical science and innovation in medicine.

Efforts to approach zero risk through exhaustive pre-release testing are extremely expensive and time-consuming. New drugs are delayed in reaching those who need them, and marginal drugs may not be developed at all.

In the collecting of evidence upon any medical subject, there are but three sources from which we can hope to obtain it: viz. from observation of the living subject; from examination of the dead; and from experiments upon living animals.

We could conquer cancer if we really wanted to.

Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.

I feel like, with how medicine is evolving, something will be out there soon that can help you heal from arthritis. That might be what helps my longevity and pushes me to keep performing.

While I am prepared to look at all options and to think 'outside the box' for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.

If we can validate our scientific bets in the clinic, if we can bring valuable new treatments to patients that need them, that will be our ultimate measure of success.