Pascal Couchepin Quotes

Arizona has excellent medical schools, both public and private, and it is critical that we create an environment that keeps medical students in Arizona to practice medicine once they complete medical school and their residency programs.

There aren't enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don't do it for the money or because they want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breathe or eat or love.

By 2020 the U.S. will be short 91,000 doctors. There's no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off.

From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies.

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented.

I studied in a medical college and qualified myself as a medical graduate.

We can have the best health insurance options in the world, and people still won't get needed care if we don't increase our supply of primary care physicians and nurses.

There is a shortage of doctors, and the American Medical Association is aiming to keep it that way.

I completed medical school at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1984.

America is facing a looming shortage of doctors, nurses, and physicians' assistants.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.

One area where the state can be more effective in addressing the doctor shortage is to focus on making sure that Arizona is a friendly environment for doctors and those wishing to practice medicine.

Medical disenfranchisement is fueled by a host of factors that include worsening shortage of primary care doctors in needy communities and a troubling scarcity of providers willing to treat the uninsured or publicly insured. Adding to the trend are fewer medical students choosing primary care over more lucrative and specialized fields.

I tell [medical students] that they are the luckiest persons on earth to be in medical school, and to forget all this worry about H.M.O.'s and keep your eye on helping the patient. It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a couple of years ago.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

People who like what I do come in all shapes and sizes. Not sure what the common denominator is per se. Oh, it's meeee! But to be embraced by a progressive community means something to me and this one feels like home.

You know, almost everyone is an irritant to me. I think people have forgotten what the word 'public' means. 'Public' means you're going to be irritated. It's a natural consequence of leaving one's home. You go outside, and there are people who are irritating. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, and someone berates me for smoking. I look at the person and think, but what about your shoes? How can you wear shoes like that and have the confidence to accost someone like me?

I have an abiding interest in how ordinary people produce knowledge, and what it means for individuals to know the world. I thought I'd be a theoretical physicist because I love physicists' views of the world - I find general relativity and quantum theory thrilling - but I have always felt uneasy with the idea of an Ultimate Truth. One of the functions of science is to help us instrumentally; it helps us to build things like microchips and GPS satellites. But another function of science in the modern world is to help us feel "at home in the universe".

Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It's not until the second year that they learn the cures.

I'm sort of socially inept, so music is my way to connect to people. It's a means of socializing and having a life. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. I would just make home recordings and play them for myself. And that's not really healthy.

One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.

Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country.