Hope Is The Best Medicine Quotes

Perhaps the greatest gift an animal has to offer is a permanent reminder of who we really are.

Over the years I've come to appreciate how animals enter our lives prepared to teach and far from being burdened by an inability to speak they have many different ways to communicate. It is up to us to listen more than hear, to look into more than past.

You're going to make it; You're going to be at peace; You're going to create, and love, and laugh, and live; You're going to do great things.

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

There are many reasons why so many of us choose to share our lives with a pet--it's the perfect antidote for loneliness, providing an endless supply of smiles and the certainty of unwavering companionship, and many of us have seen the way a pet can make a family feel whole.

Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

The amount of actual time is irrelevant because the intensity of the moment is guaranteed to last. It doesn't matter because what remains and what can never be lost is a spirit.

no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.

Our pets will never be with us for long enough, at least physically, but when they have been blessed with opportunity and been able to live a full life, how can we respond with anything less than pride and celebration?

My journey will hopefully help others. Laughter is the best medicine. Be strong.

The biology of emotional freedom depends on getting your endorphins flowing and turning off your stress hormones. How you achieve this? Laughter, exercise, meditation and doing anything that makes you loved.

Each decision we make, no matter how mundane, involves an element of chance. Everything from the food we eat, to the relationships we enter into, to the jobs we pursue- we all calculate the pros and cons and then make the best choice we can, using the information we have. It's the same with medicine. You can weigh the benefits and risks all you want, but at some point, you have to dive in and hope that the odds are in your favor.

the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of doctors, even when we call in the best of them the chances are that we may be staking our hopes on some medical theory that will be proved false in a few years. So that to believe in medicine would be utter madness, were it not still a greater madness not to believe in it, for from this accumulation of errors a few valid theories have emerged in the long run.

Perhaps this is the solution to medicine’s midlife crisis, too: doctors focusing on their noble craft, their relationships with patients, the stuff over which we have some control. Ultimately, this may be the best hope for our professional salvation.

Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe, and where striving for the truth is recognized as the most noble quest humankind will ever undertake.

SO, WHERE DOES this leave us? If we can’t rely on the market forces of supply and demand to set optimal market prices, and we can’t count on free-market mechanisms to help us maximize our utility, then we may need to look elsewhere. This is especially the case with society’s essentials, such as health care, medicine, water, electricity, education, and other critical resources. If you accept the premise that market forces and free markets will not always regulate the market for the best, then you may find yourself among those who believe that the government (we hope a reasonable and thoughtful government) must play a larger role in regulating some market activities, even if this limits free enterprise. Yes, a free market based on supply, demand, and no friction would be the ideal if we were truly rational. Yet when we are not rational but irrational, policies should take this important factor into account.

My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

When Cliff has gotten sick in the past, I have not been the best of nursemaids. Especially if there's a lot going on.I want him to be like the paraplegic and just get up and walk. But I am not Jesus and Cliff is only human. And right now he's sick. If I am learning anything from the Proverbs 31 wife, I'm going to guess that being kind and loving to my husband when he's not feeling well is a lesson I need to learn. So I resist the urge the freak out and moan and complain about all we have to do and that he just needs to suck it up and be a man and push past the fever and phlegm and pack some boxes. Instead, I push him gently into bed, pull the comforter up to his chin, and bring him cold medicine...and tell him I hope he feels better better before I quietly shut the door behind me. And resist running around the house waving my arms in despair. Six hours later, as I'm packing up the kitchen, I see Cliff walk out of the bedroom with boxes in his hands, heading toward the office. And I breathe a silent prayer of thanks that I have indeed married a man's man. And that Tylenol works really, really well. And that honey gets a lot better results than gasoline.

When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful among them. We lose the synergy when we take out the solitary compound. But most important, we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plants, may be our best hope for confronting drug-resistant bacteria.

Take Avastin, the world’s best-selling cancer medicine, with sales of $6 billion in 2010. It is used for the treatment of advanced cancers of the colon, breast, lung, and kidney, among others. An analysis of sixteen trials with more than ten thousand people showed that when Avastin was added to chemotherapy, more people died than when receiving chemotherapy alone.35 Thus, not only did the drug fail to prolong lives of hopeful patients for a few weeks or months, it in fact shortened them. Given the huge amount of money at stake for the pharmaceutical industry (Avastin treatment

Two decades ago the federal government invited 150,000 men and women to participate in an experiment of screening for cancer in four organs: prostate, lung, colon, and ovary. The volunteers were less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, had higher socioeconomic status, and fewer medical problems than members of the general population. Those are the kinds of people who seek preventive intervention. Of course, they are going to do better. Had the study not been randomized, the investigators might have concluded that screening was the best thing since sliced bread. Regardless of which group they were randomly assigned to, the participants had substantially lower death rates than the general population—for all cancers (even those other than prostate, lung, colon, and ovary), for heart disease, and for injury. In other words, the volunteers were healthier than average. With randomization, the study showed that only one of the four screenings (for colon cancer) was beneficial. Without it, the study might have concluded that prostate cancer screening not only lowered the risk of death from prostate cancer but also deaths from leukemia, heart attack, and car accidents (although you would hope someone would raise the biological plausibility criterion here).

East was the direction of hope, after all—the direction that every Navajo hogan faced to greet the morning sun. But east was also the direction from which the bilagaana had come. There was a paradox to this, and also an admonition: Ever since they could remember, the Diné had been told never to leave the confines of their four sacred mountains. If they did, the ceremonials would cease to work. Ancient chants would become meaningless, and even the best medicine men would lose their touch. And so, as the refugees filed out of Navajo country, past Acoma and Laguna pueblos, and down into the Rio Grande rift, they began to fear the consequences of drawing so close to the land of the sunrise.

He spent two years running a hospital for Chai.” Molly put her arm around the younger woman. “Which was the equivalent of working the ER in a city like New York or Chicago. He saved a lot of lives.” She made sure Max was paying attention, too. “And before you say, ‘Yeah, of drug runners, killers, and thieves,’ you should also know that his patients were just regular people who worked for Chai because he was the only steady employer in the area. Or because they knew they’d end up in some mass grave if they refused his offer of employment. Before Grady came in, if they were injured in some battle with a rival gang, they were just left for dead.” Jones looked up to find Max watching him as he sterilized a particularly sharp knife. “Me and Jesus,” he said. “So much alike, people often get us confused.” “Mock me all you want—I’m just saying.” Molly had on her Hurt Feelings Face. It may have fooled Max, but Jones knew it was only there to mask her Relentless Crusader. She was lobbying hard for Max to be on Jones’s side if they made it out of here alive. And she wasn’t done. “Yes, Grady Morant worked for Chair for a few years—after the U.S. left him to die in some torture chamber. He’s so evil, except what was he doing during those two years? Oh, he was saving lives . . .?” “I was practicing medicine without a license,” Jones pointed out. “You just gave Max something else to charge me with when we get home.” When, not if. Even though he wasn’t convinced that they weren’t in if territory, he’d used the word on purpose. The look Molly shot him was filled with gratitude. He gave her a smoldering blast of his best “Yeah, you can thank me later in private, baby” look, and, as he’d hoped she would, she laughed.

He and Blake had been busy, and I’d been busy talking to customers about random stuff while they waited. I was surprised by how nice everyone had been—with the exception of Dex's dumb face. There hadn't been a single biker in the shop either. Weird. All of this assured me that I’d avoided having to interact much with my boss. The owner. The bleeding mouth sore. The snot-faced ass**le that I only kind-of, sort-of hoped came down with an infectious illness in his private parts. But you know, something he could get medicine for. I tried my best to keep from replaying the scenario in the office but it was impossible. It wasn't his tone but the words that had seared me. And each time, it made me want to cry. It didn’t get any easier or any less painful. How the hell could someone be so rude? I didn't understand and I couldn't get over it. Every cycle had me coming up with different things to call him. A dick. A slimy bastard. A slimy, small-dicked bastard. Right? Maybe he wouldn't be so mad at the world if his pubic hair wasn’t longer than his full-blown erection. God, I felt awkward thinking about what he had under his clothes but it was the best insult I could come up with.

A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest. We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it. Not all hidden institutional functions are worth facilitating, however. Some involve quite wasteful signaling expenditures, and we might be better off if these institutions performed only their official, stated functions. Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive. These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform. Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8

Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks. Larry Kramer isn't Sophocles and he isn't Shakespeare; we don't have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer's is remarkable, invaluable, and rare. How else to dramatise revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of "Destiny" produce, by the play's end, despair again; if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which "Normal Heart" began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope. Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organise. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy, as any human enterprise, or any human being. Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment; death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well.politics is a living thing, and living things die. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn't generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have to see. the full blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatisation of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal - this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative care emerged over recent

Ear Oil This is the remedy that I used on my own children and grandchildren when they would, as children do, wake up with an ear infection. I learned it from my grandmother, who, I’m sure, learned it from her grandmother. Hopefully, my grandchildren will remember and pass it on to their grandchildren. It is truly one of the best remedies for ear infections associated with colds and respiratory congestion. (It is not effective and shouldn’t be used for “swimmer’s ear” and other instances where the infection is caused by water entering the ear.) The garlic fights the infection, and the warm oil is soothing and helps relieve the pain. Of course, if the ear infection doesn’t improve with the garlic oil treatment within 24 hours, or if it gets worse, a trip to your family health-care provider is in order. Quickly. Don’t let ear infections go untreated, as they can result in a perforated eardrum and permanent hearing loss. 1–2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced 2 tablespoons olive oil To make the oil: Combine the garlic and olive oil in the top of a double boiler. Warm over very low heat for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the oil smells strongly of garlic. Use a stainless-steel strainer lined with cheesecloth to strain out the garlic. Strain well; no garlic pieces, no matter how tiny, should be left in the oil. Pour the strained oil into a small glass dropper bottle. Store in a cool pantry or closet, where the oil will keep for several weeks, or in the refrigerator, where it will keep for several months. To use: Each time you use the oil, it needs to be warmed; just place the dropper bottle in a pan of hot water until the oil is, say, the warmth of mother’s milk. Be sure the oil is warm, not hot. If in doubt, do a test drop in your own ear. Dispense a dropperful of the warm garlic oil down each ear. The ear canals are connected and the infection can move back and forth, so always treat both ears. If possible, hold a warm, dry cloth over the ears after applying the oil, and/or gently massage around the ears. Repeat every 30 minutes, or as needed until pain subsides.

But it seems that it is modern medicine in particular that reflects best the religious heritage of our culture: its ideology, myths, dogmas, symbols, beliefs, gestures, practices, hopes and fears. Although it presents itself as rational, i.e. scientific, objective and neutral, its organisation and functioning are typical of religion. Thus, while defining itself as a secular enterprise, medicine is deeply waterlogged with the spirit of the old religion. Even more, for many, medicine becomes a new, secularised religion (Berger 1991; Clerc 2004; Dworkin 2000 [2008]; Szasz 1977; Szczeklik 2012; Tatoń 2003) and takes up its social functions. It is present in people’s life from the womb to the tomb, provides a response to the same fears and angsts of humanity as the Church, and the pursuit of ‘eternal’ health, youth and beauty has substituted the religious zeal for salvation. Medicine’s war on diseases and death is similar to a religious war against sin, as viruses and bacteria have replaced devils and demons, and the structure and functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO) is similar to that of the Church. Physicians have replaced priests and old, religious morality is being substituted by a new moral code: healthism; even though the object of faith and its expression are different, their religious nature persists.

What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

This does not mean that God never heals in miraculous ways; I am certain that at times He does. But there are also many times when He does not. We cannot understand why some people appear to glide effortlessly through life, while others always seem to be in the throes of pain and sorrow. We cannot explain why some withered bodies are healed, while others suffer and die. We cannot know why some prayers are answered the way we hoped they would be, while others seemingly go unanswered. We cannot pretend that life in Christ will always guarantee us victory and material success as defined by human standards. On the other hand, when we tell only the stories of victory, we tell just a part of the truth. When we imply that the Christian faith involves no yoke and no burden, we tell less than the whole truth. Half-truths and easy answers are the weapons of deceit. Sometimes God brings healing, either through modern medicine or through miraculous means. But sometimes He doesn’t—and His way is always best, because He loves us and knows what is best for us. Never forget: for the Christian, this life is not all, nor should our physical well-being be our life’s highest goal. Christ is our life, and someday we will go to be with Him for all eternity.

I love you silly 'holy' book. Here's hoping everybody un-reads it.

[We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

Once you are in love, you remain always in love, sometimes fulfilled and most of the times unfulfilled and broken but you remain in love. Beauty of love is to find a way when you feel there is no way to get out of the dark room. I find it more beautiful and accomplished when you are broken but you still remain in love , i find it more astonishing when he/she left you alone but you still accompany him everywhere, I find it more hedonistic when you manage to have a beautiful smile which has struggled through tears.You may say that your beloved has cheated you, your prince charming lied you, your princess sell down the river, though you have done more than that you could do and one question which is even more painful than being slaughtered is WHY SHE/HE DID THIS TO ME which remains always unanswered. This makes your life wretchedness and see who is responsible ....No not your beloved/prince/princess its you only who is in search of something which will make no difference in your life. Let them go if they want to go, if they are happy with someone else, don't beg for the love, let the love come to you automatically.You deserve to be happy, respected and much better in your life. It is difficult to remain in love when someone suddenly disappear from your life but trust me once you understand that you have really loved them, once you understand that their state of being happy is what you always wished for is more important than that they are with you unhappy or betraying you, once you understand that life has always something better for you, once you understand the value of being lively and happy ,,,,,YOU WON'T HATE HER/HIM AGAIN IN LIFE FOR STABBING YOUR BACK ....FORGIVENESS IS THE BEST MEDICINE FOR THE PEACE OF YOUR HEART & DO REMEMBER YOUR HEART DESERVES PEACE NOT THE PIECES. Love is the best thing you can cater to yourself instead of asking from someone else.

well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The

You sit down. You make time. You’re not determining whether they want treatment X versus Y. You’re trying to learn what’s most important to them under the circumstances—so that you can provide information and advice on the approach that gives them their best chance of achieving it. This process requires as much listening as talking. If you are talking more than half of the time, Block says, you’re talking too much. The words you use matter. According to palliative specialists, you shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry things turned out this way,” for example. It can sound like you’re distancing yourself. You should say, “I wish things were different.” You don’t ask, “What do you want when you are dying?” You ask, “If time becomes short, what is most important to you?” What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? How do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can’t?

As Max grows older, I hope that...he will feel empowered to make his own decisions and will have the self-confidence to challenge traditional wisdom. I also hope that he learns the difference between critical thinking and getting swept up in a wave of self-righteous hysteria, and I hope he considers the effects of his actions on those around him. Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe...

Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

Sometimes the best way to relax, unwind, and get everything straightened out... is to curl up with a good book. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Give something of yourself to the day... even if it’s just a smile to someone walking the other way. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Even if you can’t just snap your fingers and make a dream come true, you can travel in the direction of your dream, every single day, and you can keep shortening the distance between the two of you. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Rest assured that, whenever you need them, your guardian angels are great about working overtime. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Never forget what a treasure you are. That special person in the mirror may not always get to hear all the compliments you so sweetly deserve, but you are so worthy of such an abundance... of friendship, joy, and love. – Douglas Pagels, from You Are One Amazing Lady I love that I get to wake up every morning in a world that has people like you in it. – Douglas Pagels, from You Are One Amazing Lady Be someone who doesn’t make your guardian angel work too hard or worry too much. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Each day is a blank page in the diary of your life. Every day, you’re given a chance to determine what the words will say and how the story will unfold. The more rewarding you can make each page, the more amazing the entire book will be. And I would love for you to write a masterpiece. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Practice your tree pose. I want you to have a goal of finding a way to bring everything in your life into balance. Let the roots of all your dreams go deep. Let the hopes of all your tomorrows grow high. Bend, but don’t break. Take the seasons as they come. Stick up for yourself. And reach for the sky. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Remember that a new morning is good medicine... and one of the joys of life is realizing that you have the ability to make this a really great day. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Find comfort in knowing that “rising above” is something you can always find a way to do. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Look up “onward” in the thesaurus and utilize every one of those synonyms whenever you’re wondering which direction to go in. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Don’t judge yourself – love yourself. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! If you have a choice between a la-di-da life and an ooh-la-la! one, well... you know what to do. Choose the one that requires you to dust off your dancing shoes. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Write out your own definition of success. Fill it with a mix of stardust and wishes and down-to-earth things, and provide all the insight you can give it. Imagine what it takes to have a really happy, rewarding life. And then go out... and live it. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life!

Freedom from Uncontrolled Thinking A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn off my “monkey mind.” When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want. If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7. I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. [4] A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time. There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters. Maybe some of us will get there, but I’m not likely to, given how involved I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while. I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get. [8] The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

Nevertheless, by the 1980s and ’90s it was clear that immortality was not in fact around the corner and the assurances of the medical profession grew somewhat more modest. Most researchers no longer spoke of curing old age, but, instead, of “compressing” it: of shortening the natural period of ache and pain and disability and dementia that precedes active dying. The idea was that instead of experiencing long stretches of senescence, we could mobilize the forces of science and medicine to let us live our best lives until—snap. Our abrupt end. There was, Nuland wrote, “a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality.” Today, even this compression of morbidity seems illusory. In truth, increases in life expectancy have been accompanied by more years of age-induced disability. Aging has slowed down, rather than sped up. Still, and in spite of evidence to the contrary, the heady promise of a curtailed old age endures in the popular imagination. “Compression of morbidity is a quintessentially American idea,” the physician and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel wrote, in a viral 2014 Atlantic essay called “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” “It promises a kind of fountain of youth until the ever-receding time of death.

down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The field of palliative care emerged over recent decades to bring this kind of thinking to the care of dying patients. And the specialty is advancing, bringing the same approach to other seriously ill patients, whether dying or not. This is cause for encouragement. But it is not cause for celebration. That will be warranted only when all clinicians apply such thinking to every person they touch. No separate specialty required. If to be human is to be limited,

In 2015, scientists from the Center for Space Medicine and Extreme Environments in Berlin followed athletes competing in the Yukon Arctic Ultra. They wanted to know: How does the human body cope in such a brutal context? When the researchers analyzed the hormones in the bloodstreams of the athletes, one hormone, irisin, was wildly elevated. Irisin is best known for its role in metabolism—it helps the body burn fat as fuel. But irisin also has powerful effects on the brain. Irisin stimulates the brain’s reward system, and the hormone may be a natural antidepressant. Lower levels are associated with an increased risk of depression, and elevated levels can boost motivation and enhance learning. Injecting the protein directly into the brains of mice—not something scientists are ready to try with humans—reduces behaviors associated with depression, including learned helplessness and immobility in the face of threats. Higher blood levels of irisin are also associated with superior cognitive functioning, and may even prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The Yukon Arctic Ultra athletes entered the event with extraordinarily high blood levels of this hormone, far beyond levels seen in most humans. Over the course of the event, their irisin levels climbed higher. Even as their bodies fell victim to hypothermia and exhaustion, the athletes were bathing their brains in a chemical that preserves brain health and prevents depression. Why were their blood levels of irisin so elevated? The answer lies in both the nature of the event and what the athletes had to do to get there. Irisin has been dubbed the “exercise hormone,” and it is the best-known example of a myokine, a protein that is manufactured in your muscles and released into your bloodstream during physical activity. (Myo means muscle, and kine means “set into motion by.”) One of the greatest recent scientific breakthroughs in human biology is the realization that skeletal muscles act as an endocrine organ. Your muscles, like your adrenal and pituitary glands, secrete proteins that affect every system of your body. One of these proteins is irisin. Following a single treadmill workout, blood levels of irisin increase by 35 percent. The Yukon Arctic Ultra required up to fifteen hours a day of exercise. Muscle shivering—a form of muscle contraction—also triggers the release of irisin into the bloodstream. For the Yukon Arctic Ultra competitors, the combination of extreme environment and extreme exertion led to exceptionally high levels of this myokine.

If we look at Medicine Inc.’s history and how it operates today, five basic assumptions stand out that make it distinctly American: The government should not produce or provide healthcare. It’s okay to use public funds to purchase private healthcare for certain people, but only companies or private practitioners should provide healthcare. Those who receive healthcare have earned it, whether through work or through wealth. Fairness means ensuring that the deserving people receive better healthcare. There is no significant conflict between the income a doctor generates and their duty to the public. Doctors can practice simultaneously as businesspeople and as professionals sworn to a code of ethics without major repercussions. Science is impersonal and best aligns with commercial needs, not public ones. Science’s primary beneficiaries should be people who can afford to pay for it. The primary goal of healthcare is to generate income for providers. Other goals, like preventing sickness and empowering people, can happen, but only if the first goal is met. These tenets are so much a part of American healthcare that we don’t even realize our political debates reinforce them.

The goal of this new medicine—which I call Medicine 3.0—is not to patch people up and get them out the door, removing their tumors and hoping for the best, but rather to prevent the tumors from appearing and spreading in the first place. Or to avoid that first heart attack. Or to divert someone from the path to Alzheimer’s disease. Our treatments, and our prevention and detection strategies, need to change to fit the nature of these diseases, with their long, slow prologues.

For me, understanding my past and knowing that I wasn't doomed gave me the hope and fortitude to deal with the demons of my youth. And though it's cliche, the best medicine was talking about it with. the people who understood. I asked Aunt Wee if she had similar relationship experiences, and she answered almost reflexively: Of course.

Not long after the election of Bill Clinton, Leonard Leo realized that the Christian right had little hope of winning the culture war at the ballot box. A Catholic ultraconservative, Leo was sure that the public, seduced by the shallow values of a liberalizing culture, would never voluntarily submit to the moral medicine needed to save the nation. The last best chance to rescue civilization, he concluded, was to take over the courts. If activists could funnel just enough true believers onto the bench, especially onto the Supreme Court, they just might be able to reverse the moral tide. ‘He figured out twenty years ago their conservatives had lost the culture war,’ said Leo's former media relations director, Tom Carter. ‘Abortion, gay rights, contraception — conservatives didn't have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.

Yes, the world is complex, increasingly so. In all of time, it has not changed in its constant change, you see. In your own life, you are not a little girl any more. That’s it. You have grown in your parents’ love and tender care for so long, and your expectation is that family should be the best, that it should be perfect and loving, and that each family member should be wonderful and attentive to each other’s needs. This is not realistic. Kathryn, stop taking the good things for granted, be acceptable to change, and be flexible to life outcomes. Sometimes it is not as bad as you think. Trust your fate and your family are in God’s hands, okay?

Cleo loved people. She was my transparent dog. What you saw was what you got, as though you could see into her soul.

Tragedy can demolish like an explosion – swift and indiscriminate and crushing and painful. But sometimes, for some people, what remains after the rubble of confusion has had a chance to settle is an amazing clarity. Suddenly, all the obstructions and debris and pointless minutia of our life are wiped away, and for those who can open their minds, there are new, important vistas to take in, and a different way to look at the world.

Having come this far, exposed and candid, perhaps I can find sanctuary behind one incontestable truth pervading operating rooms across the country – the reality of everyday miracles. From time to time the inexplicable and the impossible happen. Behind a paper mask and under artificial lights I get to perform surgery on an unconscious body, the physical part of what we think of as a pet. Essentially I’m working construction. I’m the guy splicing wires, welding pipes, shoring up support beams, and generally renovating the house. All the other stuff, the important stuff, I cannot influence. These are the intangibles, the memories, the history, the bonds, the things that make a difference between a house and a home, the things that make the difference between a body covered in scales or feathers or fur and our pet. It is this everything else that eludes me. This everything else is the spirit of the animal. Under anesthesia, it might move out for a while, but when the surgery is done and the gas turned off, it comes back. In our worst-case scenario, regardless of whether it returns or not, it doesn’t cease to exist. Anesthesia is just a training run for the soul.

Most likely my thoughts were overshadowed by a hankering for a smaller hand size or a larger breed of patient. This was going to be tight – one-handed bomb disposal down a rabbit hole. This close to a beating heart, cutting the wrong connection or failing to cut it clean could be fatal.

I am often intrigued by the coupling between pet and human. What was it about this particular cat? Why a mouse and not a gerbil? What did this puppy do that stopped you in your tracks and made you say, “Come home with me”? Unlike choosing a human partner, pet owners aren’t usually set up by well-meaning friends. They haven’t filled out a detailed online survey that ascertains compatibility. Rather they rely on instant attraction and trust a gut feeling, an intangible instinct that more often then not ends up being exactly right.

See, Danny died” The words came out and then she laughed, defending against the tears poised to ruin her mascara. “I was with him for eighteen years. He was Danny’s dog, but Danny knew I stole Blue’s heart as much as Blue stole mine. This dog hasn’t just changed my life, this dog saved my life.” Her voice began to falter as she added, “Blue is my last connection to him. If this dog ever dies I die.

What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? The

I do know that Mikhail said when the male of his race meets his true lifemate, he can say ritual words to her and bind them together as they were meant to be. If she is not the one, neither is affected in any way, but if she is, one can’t be without the other.” Raven put a defensive hand to her throat. “What words? Did he tell you the actual words?” She remembered the words he’d whispered in his native language and then repeated to her in her language. She’d felt different, and he’d told her they were married in the eyes of his people, but that hadn’t seemed real. A dream, perhaps, hadn’t it been? Father Hummer shook his head regretfully. “Only that once said to the right woman, she is bound to him and can’t escape. The words are like our marriage vows. Carpathians have a different standard of values, of right and wrong. There is no such thing as divorce to them, it isn’t in their vocabulary. The two people are virtually two halves of the same whole.” “What if one was unhappy?” Her fingers were twisting together in agitation. She remembered hearing Mikhail say something unusual. The memory was hazy, but he’d referred to her as his lifemate more than once. She should have known he was being literal. “A Carpathian male will do anything necessary to ensure the happiness of his lifemate. I don’t know or understand how it works, but Mikhail told me the bond is so strong, a male can’t do anything else but make his woman happy.” “I don’t understand how taking away choices would ever make anyone happy.” “I believe, in this instance,” Father Hummer pointed out with a small smile, “Mikhail has no real choice either, not if you’re his true lifemate. He accepts what is because he is a true Carpathian.” “But I’m not,” Raven said. “I don’t like secrets and I abhor lies, yet I find myself saying things that aren’t true because it seems in Mikhail’s best interest.” “He didn’t ask it of you, did he? That was your choice,” he argued gently. “How much has he told you of himself?” “Not much.” Wary now, she felt she was treading on treacherous ground. At all costs, she had to protect Mikhail--even if it meant lying to a priest. She hated that she would, but she knew she would never betray Mikhail. Raven touched her neck, her palm lingering over her pulse. “Whatever he did must work, Father, because I’m not the type to throw myself off a balcony because I’ve been away from a man a couple of hours.” “I guess we should both be hoping Mikhail is getting a taste of his own medicine,” Father Hummer said with a small smile.