healthcare evolution Quotes

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

People call me an optimist, but I'm really an appreciator ... years ago, I was cured of a badly infected finger with antibiotics when once my doctor could have recommended only a hot water soak or, eventually, surgery.... When I was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I'm grateful for computers and photocopiers ... I appreciate where we've come from.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization

When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites.

Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

It worries me about our unwillingness to really address reforms and modernization in Medicare. This thing was designed 37 years ago. It has not evolved to keep pace with current medical technology.

After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last century. Medicine exemplifies this. And that has transitioned us from a world in which people's lives were mostly governed by ignorance to one that's constrained by ineptitude. A century ago, we didn't know, for instance, what diseases afflicted us, what their nature really was, or what to do about them. And that has changed.

Having a consumer brand helps us a lot. We will see more ambulatory care, and there will be a lot of new ways to deliver healthcare... and that means consumerism is going to play a bigger role.

For most of the rise of modern medicine, the brain was a really unknown zone and was all based in guesswork. Well, that's all changing. And the opioid recovery is a very good example of the scale of change we're seeing.

In matters pertaining to the care of life there has been no marked gain over Greek and Roman antiquity.