S. Jay Olshansky Quotes

Advances in science and medical research and public health policies have meant that life expectancy for Australians is one of the highest in the world.

Community health centers do a great deal with limited resources. They provide critical medical care services to many who would otherwise have no other place to go or would end up in an emergency room.

We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.

In the future, it's going to become more and more impossible for the economy to support how expensive medical care is and the number of sick people we have. Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors as we have on HIV.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

I begin with the premise that behavior is an incredibly important element in medicine. People's habits, their willingness to quit smoking, their willingness to take steps to avoid transmission of HIV, are all behavioral questions.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

I want us to be judged by the impact we have on the health of the people of Africa and the health of women. Improvements in the health of the people of Africa and the health of women are key indicators of the performance of WHO. This is a health organization for the whole world... But we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.

Health is more than the absence of disease…It is also education….We have a health illiterate society.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged

[Public Health] means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.

Health is the one thing we all have in common regardless of race, creed, or income. Everyone should participate in creating the solutions.

You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.

I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.

Modern medical advances have helped millions of people live longer, healthier lives. We owe these improvements to decades of investment in medical research.

I want to thank the efforts of the American Public Health Association and its 200-plus partners who have organized events around the Nation that serve to raise everyone's awareness of the need to improve public health.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.

According to the comprehensive Global Burden of Disease project, the leading risk factors for ill health and premature death are linked to lifestyle, what we eat and drink and how much we exercise. Disease prevention does not occur in the hospital. We need the whole of society to be involved.

The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.

I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.

We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.