“We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.”

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.

Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you

Homeopathy is a progressive and aggressive step in medicine.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

I’d probably start charging for medical timeouts. I think we’d all see who really uses them and who doesn’t.

I’m the most antimedication person, but some people need medicine, and there was a time where I needed some too.

I take a hiatus every now and again, but I’m not good at that.

They legalized alcohol, they legalized tobacco. What is it gonna hurt to legalize this medicinal, medical marijuana that’s used for purposes of cataracts?

Prayer is a very precious medicine, one that certainly helps and never fails, if you will only use it.

I’ve been in these tabloids for 14 years now, and at some point you just become a Zen master of it all.