Medical Philosophy Quotes

The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.

From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me.

I am the doctor of our family, and I am a big fan of homeopathy.

The best doctor gives the least medicines.

One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn't be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn't have to operate on them in the first place!

Chiropractic is founded upon different principles than those of medicine.

It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within.

Disease is a disturbed condition, not a thing or entity.

To find health should be the object of the doctor. Any one can find disease.

The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.

The very success of medicine in a material way may now threaten the soul of medicine.

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

The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin goes all the way back to the origins of medicine. For most of its history, the practice was not separated from other aspects of human activity.

A naturopath once told me you should never take antibiotics except if you have pneumonia, a kidney infection or some other serious illness. That's my philosophy, too.

It seems to me that your doctor [Tronchin] is more of a philosopher than a physician. As for me, I much prefer a doctor who is anoptimist and who gives me remedies that will improve my health. Philosophical consolations are, after all, useless against real ailments. I know only two kinds of sickness--physical and moral: all the others are purely in the imagination.

Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined.

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.

All medicine comes down to this: Find out what's bugging you; get rid of it. Find out what you need; get it. The body does the rest.

We are neither obstinately nor wilfully to oppose evils, nor truckle under them for want of courage, but that we are naturally to give way to them, according to their condition and our own, we ought to grant free passage to diseases; and I find they stay less with me who let them alone. And I have lost those which are reputed the most tenacious and obstinate of their own defervescence, without any help or art, and contrary to their rules. Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.