Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read
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Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
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He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
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Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
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I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.
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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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