Healthcare Approach Quotes

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.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

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.

I don't think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they're already sick and we don't deal with what's making them sick to start with, that's a real problem.

We need to start treating the patient as well as the disease.

The current approach that psychiatry takes almost ignores social worlds in which mental health problems arise and tries to become highly biomedical like other branches of medicine such as cardiology or oncology. But psychiatry has to be far more embedded in people's personal and social worlds.

We have to rethink, how do we get a complete 360-degree understanding of the patient?

The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.

The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.

Most people look at ageing as a disease. They do. They have prescriptions and places where you go to eradicate it.

I'm a big proponent of having a mental health component go along with whatever the physical realities are.

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.

Hospitals are great places, and you can learn from them, but you don't necessarily need to go in anytime you get the sniffles. And maybe you shouldn't treat pregnancy as a disease.

The fact that doctors tend to treat people as individuals, guided by the need to ensure patient confidentiality, can reinforce this pattern of seeing the changes and challenges aging brings on through our heads and our bodies, rather than as a shared experience.

I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism.