Joel Fuhrman Quotes

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...

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.

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

[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.

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.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

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.

The objective of the World Health Organization shall be "the attainment by all peoples of highest possible level of health.

Health is both the foundation of my academic and professional careers and a personal passion. I know first-hand the important role health security plays in protecting lives and preventing the spread of disease.

Vaccination and other essential preventive services must be delivered close within communities.

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

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

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.

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

Access to basic quality health care is one of the most important domestic issues facing our nation.

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

Our health care system is terribly broken… Health comes from much more than health care and health care is much more than hospitals. We do a good job on treatment and a terrible job on prevention.

The health of our nation is the wealth of our nation.

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

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

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

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

Making sure that people have access to preventive medicine for the first time ever as a nation? That's a big deal.

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.