Medical Motivational Quotes

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Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.
Shannon L. Alder
All worries are less with wine.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Hunger gives flavour to the food.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
If you examine your motive for doing anything, you'll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think "Why me?" They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.
Vironika Tugaleva
Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.
Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation--head down, trying not to screw up, just going from one day to the next--that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and offering you a job. But the day comes.
Atul Gawande (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance)
To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place... It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses, whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now, there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewel was beaten - savagely, by someone who led exclusively with his left. And Tom Robinson now sits before you having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses... his RIGHT. I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime - she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a *****. She was white, and she tempted a *****. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young ***** man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption... the evil assumption that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all ***** men are not to be trusted around our women. An assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is, in itself, gentlemen, a lie, which I do not need to point out to you. And so, a quiet, humble, respectable *****, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against TWO white people's! The defendant is not guilty - but somebody in this courtroom is. Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system - that's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of GOD, do your duty. In the name of God, believe... Tom Robinson
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Our schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and mathematics while ignoring the other studies that are essential elements of a good education. Schools that expect nothing more of their students than mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college or the modern workplace. *** Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure. The tests we have now provide useful information about students' progress in reading and mathematics, but they cannot measure what matters most in education....What is tested may ultimately be less important that what is untested... *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors. *** Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools. *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to drive away experienced principals and replace them with neophytes who have taken a leadership training course but have little or no experience as teachers. *** Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.
Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
Not only a man without hand is handicapped but also a man without health.
Amit Kalantri
Product Warning If this book were a medication with a label, it would read something like this: Side Effects Include but Are Not Limited to renewed sense of self-esteem increased motivation in all areas of life You may also lose weight, fall in love, leave a bad marriage, create a better one, have closer relationships with your family, or find the job of your dreams. Some Users Have experienced a kick in their step a swing in their hips a twinkle in their eye Hair-tossing (commercial-style) is common, but seek medical attention if you pinch a nerve or can’t stop doing it.
Stacy London (The Truth About Style)
Go out and heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons and preach the kingdom. But do it for only one reason. Your motive should be an overwhelming love and compassion for those in need. There is no other legitimate motive for healing.
Praying Medic (Divine Healing Made Simple (The Kingdom of God Made Simple))
I have noticed over the past three years that most African Christians depend on their pastor or preachers for directions in life than their lecturers, politicians and nurses. That tells why most people refuse certain medical priorities with regards to their pastor's messages. I think if every pastor should have entrepreneurial knowledge coupled with spiritual integrity, Africa will shake!
Israelmore Ayivor (The Great Hand Book of Quotes)
Islamophobia may not actually be considered as a medical condition, unlike a medical condition, it is nothing but a primordial disgrace to the character of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
Regardless of a patient’s true motives to get out of bed, I always applaud on the inside. That’s what physical therapy is all about. To get them out of bed. To coax them down to the rehab gym.
Adele Levine (Run, Don't Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center)
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid fifties and I was given Ritalin and Dexedrine. These are stimulant medications. They elevate the level of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is the motivation chemical, so when you are more motivated you pay attention. Your mind won't be all over the place. So we elevate dopamine levels with stimulant drugs like Ritalin, Aderall, Dexedrine and so on. But what else elevates Dopamine levels? Well, all other stimulants do. What other stimulants? Cocaine, crystal meth, caffeine, nicotine, which is to say that a significant minority of people that use stimulants, illicit stimulants, you know what they are actually doing? They're self-medicating their ADHD or their depression or their anxiety. So on one level (and we have to go deeper that that), but on one level addictions are about self-medications. If you look at alcoholics in one study, 40% of male adult alcoholics met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD? Why? Because alcohol soothes the hyperactive brain. Cannabis does the same thing. And in studies of stimulant addicts, about 30% had ADHD prior to their drug use. What else do people self-medicate? Someone mentioned depression. So, if you have been treated for depression, as I have been, and you were given a SSRI medication, these medications elevate the level of another brain chemical called serotonin, which is implicated in mood regulation. What else elevates serotonin levels temporarily in the brain? Cocaine does. People use cocaine to self-medicate depression. People use alcohol, cannabis and opiates to self-medicate anxiety. Incidentally people also use gambling or shopping to self-medicate because these activities also elevate dopamine levels in the brain. There is no difference between one addiction and the other. They're just different targets, but the brain systems that are involved and the target chemicals are the same, no matter what the addiction. So people self-medicate anxiety, depression. People self-medicate bipolar disorder with alcohol. People self-medicate Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. So, one way to understand addictions is that they're self-medicating. And that's important to understand because if you are working with people who are addicted it is really important to know what's going on in their lives and why are they doing this. So apart from the level of comfort and pain relief, there's usually something diagnosible that's there at the same time. And you have to pay attention to that. At least you have to talk about it.
Gabor Maté
Without a doubt, what the war on obesity has created the most of is stigma. It has turned fatness into the ultimate moral sin and given the public a medically motivated reason to bully, harass, and discriminate against someone based on their size.
Megan Jayne Crabbe (Body Positive Power: Because Life Is Already Happening and You Don't Need Flat Abs to Live It)
Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.")
Wendell Berry (Another Turn of the Crank: Essays)
When the snow lifted and I was able to get my medication, I felt like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz in need of oil to begin moving again. Then as I began to write, my mind was much more fluid. I had the cognitive fuel to function. My brain was the same brain it was the day before, I had the same interest, motivation, ideas, and abilities, but without the medication, I just didn’t have the fuel to access those parts of me and use them. Even a luxury car like a Rolls Royce isn’t going anywhere without fuel. In the same way, medication for individuals with AD/HD is often the fuel that allows the brain to function smoothly and work to its potential.
Sari Solden (Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life)
The popular media and conventional wisdom, including the medical profession's traditional approach to nutrition, have created and continue to perpetuate this problem through inadequate, outdated dietary counseling. Attempts to universalize dietary therapies so that one-diet-fits-all influences the flawed claims against meats and fats, thereby encouraging overconsumption of grains. Government-sponsored guides to healthy eating, such as the USDA's food pyramid, which advocates six to eleven servings of grains daily for everyone, lag far behind current research and continue to preach dangerously old-fashioned ideas. Because the USDA's function is largely the promotion of agriculture and agricultural products, there is a clear conflict of interest inherent in any USDA claim of healthful benefits arising from any agricultural product. Popular beliefs and politically motivated promotion, not science, continue to dictate dietary recommendations, leading to debilitating and deadly diseases that are wholly or partly preventable.
Ron Hoggan (Dangerous Grains: Why Gluten Cereal Grains May Be Hazardous To Your Health)
This is a prescription drug, and a functional medical doctor or anti-aging doctor will usually prescribe 1 mg per day (about a tenth of a high dose) starting in your thirties, and increase the dosage by 1 mg for every decade of age after that. In addition to the anti-aging effects, many users notice positive changes in motivation, energy, and concentration.
Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)
In short: all the woo is keeping us from dealing with our poo. Instead of medicating with Marlboros and martinis, we might be doing it with metaphysics and macrobiotics. And unlike boozing it up to drown our pain, the side effects of neurotic psychoanalyzing or forced flexibility are difficult to spot. We don't end up in rehab from too much meditation or therapy -- we just end up in more workshops. Think of that friend you have who has a not-so-loving relationship with her body, but because she eats "health foods" and talks a good "body positive" talk about just wanting to be strong, we cheer her on. But really, she's got self-destructive motivations and a mild eating disorder disguised as a holistic wellness routine. On the surface, positivity and wellness goalkeeping present so nicely that it can be hard to see when healthy actions are hooked to unhealthy ambitions. Like too much of anything, spiritual bypassing can numb us out from our Truth -- which is where the healing answers wait to be found.
Danielle LaPorte
Regardless of a patient's true motives to get out of bed, I always applaud on the inside. That's what physical therapy is all about. To get them out of bed. To coax them down to the rehab gym. To do their strengthening exercises. To buy into the program. All in order to prepare them for the day they will eventually walk again. But I downplay my enthusiasm at a soldier's pain-tinged request for fear he'll figure out that's what I've been trying to get him to do and rebel. It's always better to make it seem like it is their idea all along.
Adele Levine (Run, Don't Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center)
The truth about productivity is that it's not really about the apps, it's not really about having a perfect system or about being disciplined or motivated more than anyone else. When I think of my own life and how I do things like: YouTube channel, entrepreneurship, medical school, being a doctor, none of it feels like suffering, none of it feels like a grind. So, when my housemate says: "It's 11 o'clock at night, why are you still working?", it's always a bit surprising because it really doesn't feel like work because it's actually fun. The main insight that I've realized is that productivity isn't really about getting more things done, it's mostly about LEARNING TO ENJOY THE JOURNEY.
Ali Abdaal
The power of format creates opportunities for manipulation, which people with an axe to grind know how to exploit. Slovic and his colleagues cite an article that states that “approximately 1,000 homicides a year are committed nationwide by seriously mentally ill individuals who are not taking their medication.” Another way of expressing the same fact is that “1,000 out of 273,000,000 Americans will die in this manner each year.” Another is that “the annual likelihood of being killed by such an individual is approximately 0.00036%.” Still another: “1,000 Americans will die in this manner each year, or less than one-thirtieth the number who will die of suicide and about one-fourth the number who will die of laryngeal cancer.” Slovic points out that “these advocates are quite open about their motivation: they want to frighten the general public about violence by people with mental disorder, in the hope that this fear will translate into increased funding for mental health services.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Peer into any corner of current American life, and you’ll find the positive-thinking outlook. From the mass-media ministries of evangelists such as Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, and T.D. Jakes to the millions-strong audiences of Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Mehmet Oz, from the motivational bestsellers and seminars of the self-help movement to myriad twelve-step programs and support groups, from the rise of positive psychology, mind-body therapies, and stress-reduction programs to the self-affirmative posters and pamphlets found on walls and racks in churches, human-resources offices, medical suites, and corporate corridors, this one idea—to think positively—is metaphysics morphed into mass belief. It is the ever-present, every-man-and-woman wisdom of our time. It forms the foundation of business motivation, self-help, and therapeutic spirituality, including within the world of evangelism. Its influence has remade American religion from being a salvational force to also being a healing one.
Mitch Horowitz (One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life)
Ea luă loc la pian, în timp ce el se aşeză în faţa focului care ardea frumos în chemineu, şi începu să cânte pentru el. Indiferent, în timp ce melodia invada camera amestecându-se cu zgomotul produs de troznetul butucilor care ardeau, Duncan simţi cum îl cuprinde liniştea. Când tânăra femeie se opri din cântat, el îşi regăsise calmul. - Spune-mi, tot mai vrei să fugi? întrebă ea. - Nu, dumneavoastră ştiţi foarte bine că vreau să continui să fac ceva important ... ceva foarte important în medicină. - Cu adevărat? munca aceasta te interesează. - Cu pasiune! Iar dumneavoastră, dumneavoastră cântaţi minunat! - Este foarte necesar pentru degetele mele. Asta le face să fie puternice şi suple. Nu uita că sunt chirurg. - Aproape am uitat. Cu toate că numele pe care îl purtaţi îmi este cunoscut. Există un doctor Geisler foarte cunoscut în Austria, doctorul Ana Geisler. A scris o carte extraordinară despre chirurgia modernă. Este cumva o rudă de a dumneavoastră? - Nu chiar ... pentru simplul motiv că sunt chiar eu doctorul Ana Geisler!
A.J. Cronin
You have to imagine what it was like to be on the receiving end of vicious antagonism: sneering, contempt, ridicule, slights about one’s intelligence, integrity and motives. In those days, women even ran the risk of dismissal for their opinions. And this treatment came from other women, as well as men. In fact, “in-fighting” between various schools of nurses who had some sort of training in midwifery was particularly nasty. One eminent lady – the matron of St Bartholomew’s Hospital – branded the aspiring midwives as “anachronisms, who would in the future be regarded as historical curiosities”. The medical opposition seems to have arisen mainly from the fact that “women are striving to interfere too much in every department of life”.* Obstetricians also doubted the female intellectual capacity to grasp the anatomy and physiology of childbirth, and suggested that they could not therefore be trained. But the root fear was – guess what? – you’ve got it, but no prizes for quickness: money. Most doctors charged a routine one guinea for a delivery. The word got around that trained midwives would undercut them by delivering babies for half a guinea! The knives were out.
Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (The Midwife Trilogy #1))
Diagnozele clinice sunt importante, întrucât oferă o oarecare orientare, dar ele nu-l ajută cu nimic pe pacient. Punctul decisiv este problema “poveștii” pacientului; căci ea dezvăluie fundalul uman și suferința umană și numai atunci poate începe terapia medicului. Am văzut asta clar și într-un alt caz. Era vorba despre o pacientă bătrână de la secția de femei, în vârstă de șaptezeci și cinci de ani. Venise la spital cu aproape cincizeci de ani în urmă, dar nimeni nu-și mai amintea de momentul internării ei; toți muriseră între timp. Doar o soră-șefă, care lucra în această instituție de treizeci și cinci de ani, mai știa câte ceva din povestea ei. Bătrâna nu mai putea vorbi și nu putea consuma decât hrană lichidă sau semilichidă. Își ducea hrana la gură numai cu ajutorul degetelor. Uneori îi lua aproape două ore pentru o cană de lapte. Dacă nu era ocupată cu mâncarea, făcea niște mișcări ciudate, ritmice, cu mâinile și brațele, cărora nu le înțelegeam natura și sensul. Eram profund impresionat de gradul distrugerii pe care-l poate produce o boală mintală, dar nu găseam nici o explicație. În conferințele clinice era prezentată ca o formă catatonică de demență precoce, ceea ce nu-mi spunea nimic, căci nu mă lămurea absolut deloc în legătură cu semnificația și originea mișcărilor ei ciudate. Impresia lăsată de acest caz asupra mea caracterizează reacția mea la psihiatria de atunci. Când am ajuns medic, am avut senzația că nu pricepeam nimic din ceea ce pretindea psihiatria că este. Mă simțeam extrem de jenat față de șeful meu și de colegii care afișau atâta siguranță, în timp ce eu orbecăiam nedumerit prin întuneric. Consideram că misiunea principală a psihiatriei este cunoașterea lucrurilor care se petrec în interiorul spiritului bolnav, iar despre aceasta nu știam încă nimic. Eram antrenat deci într-o meserie în care nu mă orientam deloc! Într-o seară, târziu, m-am dus prin secție, am văzut-o pe bătrâna cu mișcările ei enigmatice și m-am întrebat din nou: de ce o fi așa? Care o fi explicația? M-am dus la bătrâna noastră soră-șefă și m-am interesat dacă pacienta fusese dintotdeauna astfel. – Da, mi-a răspuns, dar sora dinaintea mea îmi povestea că pe vremuri bolnava confecționa pantofi. Apoi i-am studiat încă o dată vechea poveste; scria despre ea că ar fi avut niște gesturi de parcă ar fi făcut cizmărie. Odinioară, cizmarii țineau pantofii între genunchi și trăgeau firele prin piele cu niște mișcări foarte asemănătoare. (La cizmarii de la sate se mai poate vedea și astăzi.) Pacienta a murit curând și fratele ei mai mare a venit pentru înmormântare. – De ce s-a îmbolnăvit sora dumneavoastră? l-am întrebat. Mi-a povestit că sora lui iubise un cizmar, care însă nu voise să se însoare cu ea dintr-un oarecare motiv și atunci ea “o luase razna”. Mișcările de cizmar arătau identificarea ei cu omul iubit, care a durat până la moarte.
C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
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
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
Staying at Home during this lockdown period is the right time to find your life purpose within Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. This is an opportunity to know yourself better and to understand what motivates and feeds your mind and your soul, and also to find out as to where you fit in the bigger Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. All members of each family/clan possess characteristics, abilities, and qualities specific to that family/clan. It is up to the family/clan to distinguish itself amongst other families/clans. Ba Ga Mohlala has become an institution to build cooperation in order to build and forge unity for social and economic benefits for Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general. An institution is social structure in which people cooperate and which influences the behavior of people and the way they live. intelligence and assertiveness comes to us as our nature, it is in our blood (DNA) and all there is for us to do is to nature it and it will shine, otherwise it will gather dust and rust in us. The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers. Our bond (through our shared blood/DNA) as Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan is our insurance for the future. As Ba Ga Mohlala we can have our own Law firms, Auditing Firms, Doctors's Medical Surgeries, Private School, Private Clinics or Private Hospital, farms and lot of small to medium manufacturing, service, retail and wholesale companies and become self relient. All it takes to achieve that is unity, willpower and commitment.
Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
entire project would be kicked back, and he would need to start the submission process again. The proposal had to be perfect this time. If not, he was sure his competitors would swoop in on this opportunity to launch their own devices. He had spent the last two years on this project, and he was so close—only twenty-seven days left to make all the necessary corrections. He could not afford distractions now. Too much was riding on this; his name was riding on this. He remembered what his father always told him: “No one remembers the name of the person who came in second.” These words motivated him all through high school to earn a full scholarship to Boston University, where he earned his BA and master’s degrees in computer science, and then his PhD in robotics engineering at MIT. Those degrees had driven him to start his own business, Vinchi Medical Engineering, and at age thirty-four, he still lived by those words to keep the company on top. The intercom buzzed. “Your conference call is ready on line one, Mr. Vinchi.” “What the hell were you guys thinking?” Jon barked as soon as he got on the line. Not waiting for them to answer, Jon continued, “Whose bright idea was it to submit my name to participate at this event—or any event, for that matter? This type of thing has your name written all over it, Drew. Is this your doing?” As always, Trent said it the way it was. “If you had attended the last meeting, Jon, you would have been brought up to date for this and would have had the chance to voice any opposition to your participation.” It was a moot point, Jon knew he’d missed their last meeting—actually, their last few meetings—due to his own business needs. But this stunt wasn’t solely about the meeting, and he knew it. “Trent, I have always supported the decisions you guys have made in the past, but I am not supporting this one. What makes you think I will even show? I don’t have time for this nonsense.” “Time is valuable to all of us, Jon. We all have our own companies to run besides supporting what is needed for Takes One. Either you’re fully invested in this, or you’re not. There are times when it takes more than
Jeannette Winters (The Billionaire's Secret (Betting on You, #1))
Kathy’s teachers view her as a good student who always does her homework but rarely participates in class. Her close friends see her as a loyal and trustworthy person who is a lot of fun once you get to know her. The other students in school think she is shy and very quiet. None of them realize how much Kathy struggles with everyday life. When teachers call on her in class, her heart races, her face gets red and hot, and she forgets what she wants to say. Kathy believes that people think she is stupid and inadequate. She imagines that classmates and teachers talk behind her back about the silly things she says. She makes excuses not to go to social events because she is terrified she will do something awkward. Staying home while her friends are out having a good time also upsets her. “Why can’t I just act like other people?” she often thinks. Although Kathy feels isolated, she has a very common problem--social anxiety. Literally millions of people are so affected by self-consciousness that they have difficulties in social situations. For some, the anxiety occurs during very specific events, such as giving a speech or eating in public. For others, like Kathy, social anxiety is part of everyday life. Unfortunately, social anxiety is not an easily diagnosed condition. Instead, it is often viewed as the far edge of a continuum of behaviors and feelings that occur during social situations. Although you may not have as much difficulty as Kathy, shyness may still be causing you distress, affecting your relationships, or making you act in ways with which you are not happy. If this is the case, you will benefit from the advice and techniques provided in this book. The good news is that it is possible to change your thinking and behavior. However, there are no easy solutions. It takes strong motivation and time to overcome social anxiety. It might even be necessary to see a professional therapist or take medication. Eventually, becoming free of your anxiety will make the hard work well worth the effort. This book will help you understand social anxiety and the impact it can have on your life, now and in the future. You will find out how the disorder is diagnosed, you will receive information on professional guidance, and you will learn ways to cope with and manage the symptoms. Becoming an extroverted person is probably unlikely, but you can become more confident in social situations and increase your self-esteem.
Heather Moehn (Social Anxiety (Coping With Series))
Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies, stated: “Negroes are universally fond of suckling their children for a long time. If you permit them, they will extend it to the third year . . . Their motives for this are habit, an idea of its necessity, the desire of being spared at their labour
Gabrielle Palmer (The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business)
March 7 Looking at the Inside The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.—1 Samuel 16:7b My husband just had an amazing medical test. The technology, which has only been available for three years, actually shows the inside of your body. The cardiologist described it as doing an autopsy while you are still alive. He has actual pictures of his heart, as well as other organs. The test is able to identify cholesterol, tumors, and other aberrations that might be present. However as great as that is, there is still no test that can read our minds and determine the motives of our hearts. Only God is able to do that. He knows what we are thinking. He knows what we are about to do, as well as what we are about to say before we say it. God still can identify a true believer, a pure heart, and a child of His. There will never be any technology to replace what only God can do. Wouldn’t it be awful if someone knew what you were thinking at times? What if someone were able to identify your motives? If we only looked deeper into our souls before we spoke, and thought more honestly about our motives before doing something, maybe we would reconsider. I am thankful others can’t do that; but I need to be more concerned about what my Jesus already knows about me. I should be more careful of the things I say and do, so I do not disappoint my Savior. Jesus, help me to be more sincere in all I do so that my life glorifies You in all ways.
The writers of Encouraging.com (God Moments: A Year in the Word)
Nourish your soul, mediate daily.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
back up his story? He didn’t give Picard any other names. Only Farley.” Tyson shook his head. “Maybe Farley was the only one whose whereabouts he knew. Maybe they kept up their wartime acquaintance.” “A medical doctor and a strung-out paraplegic junkie? I doubt that. Were they good friends over there?” “Not that I recall.” Corva sat. “This is like pulling teeth. You are not going to tell me what motivates Brandt and Farley, though I think you know.” “Maybe later, Vince, if it gets down to that.” Corva snapped his briefcase shut. “Okay. So Friday it will be you and I and Colonel
Nelson DeMille (Word of Honor)
Jesus, the gospel should be all the motivation I need for living as a compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, and patient man—especially when I consider this is how you relate to me 24/7, in full view of my ill-deserving ways. I’ll never experience you as insensitive, unkind, proud, harsh, or impatient. Indeed, through the gospel, I’ve become a member of God’s chosen, holy, dearly loved people. Yet it does take more: sometimes it takes pain. Today is just such a day. As I pray, I’m hurting big-time. Today it will be easier for me to clothe myself with compassion than with cotton. Yesterday afternoon I forgot that exercising at the gym doesn’t qualify me to be a refrigerator mover. But as I hurt, I’m moved to pray today for chronic sufferers—those who cry, “How long, O Lord?” for better reasons and with more tears than I have. Jesus, I pray for people with unrelenting pain in their bodies—those who no longer get any relief from physical therapy or medication. I pray for people with emotional and mental diseases, who live in the cruel world of delusional thinking and sabotaging emotions. I pray for their families and caregivers. I pray for the unconscionable number of children in the world who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition and for their parents who feel both shame and helplessness. Lord, these and many more stories of great suffering I bring before you. I also pray for the worst chronic suffering of all: for those who are “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12 NIV). Come, Holy Spirit, come, and apply the saving benefits of Jesus to the religious and the nonreligious alike—to those who may be in the church or in the culture but who are not in Christ. Jesus, I anticipate getting over this back pain pretty soon, but I don’t want to get over compassionate praying and compassionate living. I pray in your kind and caring name. Amen.
Scotty Smith (Everyday Prayers: 365 Days to a Gospel-Centered Faith)
Here’s a classic case in point: Eva had been taking an antidepressant for two years but wanted to get off it because she was planning to get pregnant. Her doctor advised her not to stop taking the drug, which motivated her to see me. Eva explained that her saga had begun with PMS, featuring a week each month when she was irritable and prone to crying fits. Her doctor prescribed a birth control pill (a common treatment) and soon Eva was feeling even worse, with insomnia, fatigue, low libido, and a generally flat mood dogging her all month long. That’s when the doctor added the Wellbutrin to “pick her up,” as he said, and handle her presumed depression. From Eva’s perspective, she felt that the antidepressant helped her energy level, but it had limited benefits in terms of her mood and libido. And if she took it after midnight, her insomnia was exacerbated. She soon became accustomed to feeling stable but suboptimal, and she was convinced that the medication was keeping her afloat. The good news for Eva was that with careful preparation, she could leave medication behind—and restore her energy, her equilibrium, and her sense of control over her emotions. Step one consisted of some basic diet and exercise changes along with better stress response strategies. Step two involved stopping birth control pills and then testing her hormone levels. Just before her period, she had low cortisol and progesterone, which were likely the cause of the PMS that started her whole problem. Further testing revealed borderline low thyroid function, which may well have been the result of the contraceptives—and the cause of her increased depressive symptoms. When Eva was ready to begin tapering off her medication, she did so following my protocol. Even as her brain and body adjusted to not having the antidepressant surging through her system anymore, her energy levels improved, her sleep problems resolved, and her anxiety lifted. Within a year she was healthy, no longer taking any prescriptions, feeling good—and pregnant.
Kelly Brogan (A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives)
Critical thinking helps us to more clearly understand situations, patients, colleagues, and our agendas, negative emotions, attitudes, motivations, talents, and growing edges. This not only helps us to have a greater grasp of reality but also stops the drain of psychological energy that is necessary to be defensive or to protect our image. Because critical thinking is not natural, although we may think it is for us, it takes discipline, a willingness to face the unpleasant, and a stamina that allows one not to become unduly frustrated when we do not achieve results as quickly as we prefer with respect to our insights and growth.
Robert J. Wicks (Overcoming Secondary Stress in Medical and Nursing Practice: A Guide to Professional Resilience and Personal Well-Being)
a particular complex of personality traits, including excessive competition drive, aggressiveness, impatience, and a harrying sense of time urgency. Individuals displaying this pattern seem to be engaged in a chronic, ceaseless, and often fruitless struggle—with themselves, with others, with circumstances, with time, sometimes with life itself.2 These people were significantly more likely to develop heart disease than other patients—even those who shared similar physical attributes, exercise regimens, diets, and family histories. Looking for a convenient and memorable way to explain this insight to their medical colleagues and the wider world, Friedman and Rosenman found inspiration in the alphabet. They dubbed this behavioral pattern “Type A.
Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
And so, just as the humanity of our cadavers asserts itself in nail polish and tattoos, the inverse of humanity emerges in the body's utter lack of response to profound wounds.
Christine Montross (Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab)
So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
Finally, as I’ve emphasized, there is the level of conscious public policy. A Soviet official issuing a planning document, or an American politician calling for job creation, might not be entirely aware of the likely effects of their action. Still, once a situation is created, even as an unintended side effect, politicians can be expected to size up the larger political implications of that situation when they make up their minds what—if anything—to do about it. Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”9 I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.10 So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
Sometimes, the superstitions show the mysterious and specific ways to search, investigate, and realize the negative and positive results. I do not dig into the detail of the subject; however, in short, to define the concerns that I felt and feel yet. As criminals sell the drugs, to cause the health problems to innocent people; similarly, such criminals can adapt the various directions, to damage the humanity since many of us suffer from prostate and other cancer, which one may never consider that it is a natural consequence. One can always think that it became a victim of the criminals, who succeeded to victimize others. During the discussion with one of the urologists, whom I am under treatment, I expressed my concerns, referring to the examples as the Japanese scientist Minoru Shirota, created the mixture of skimmed milk with bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota, as Yakult, which develops health; conversely, one may prepare the beads of Helicobacter pylori, as homeopathy medicine that can cause cancer bacteria. The scientists should investigate such a matter, which is natural and unnatural since the world is under the criminals, and the evil-minded people, who can adopt such ways. It may seem as, an illusion; however, it can be the reality? Is it possible that criminals and spy agencies can pass on and transmit the cancerous cells in any form, to their opponents or cancerous medical manufacturers can involve, for selling and financial benefits upon the human sufferings? As far as one can realize, yes, it is possible, according to an illusion theory that, I have stated above insight of this passage. However, further study, investigation, and research should be on its way, for the concrete and significant outcome of that since the money-mongers can adopt all routes for their greediness and criminal motives, with the calibration of medical professionals.
Ehsan Sehgal
Have you considered Medical Assisting, or phlebotomy, but not sure if they are the right fit for you? Maybe it’s time to consider Ultrasound Technology! At NCE, we train motivated students just like you to enter this highly rewarding medical field. Ultrasound Technician Programs is a rewarding career choice. It requires a great deal of commitment as your abilities directly impact patient care.
Sal Younis
The DSM-V offers a comprehensive set of criteria to define narcissism: A. Significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by: 1. Impairments in self functioning (a or b): a. Identity: Excessive reference to others for self-definition and self-esteem regulation; exaggerated self-appraisal may be inflated or deflated, or vacillate between extremes; emotional regulation mirrors fluctuations in self-esteem. b. Self-direction: Goal-setting is based on gaining approval from others; personal standards are unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional, or too low based on a sense of entitlement; often unaware of own motivations. AND 2. Impairments in interpersonal functioning (a or b): a. Empathy: Impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others; excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self; over- or underestimate of own effect on others. b. Intimacy: Relationships largely superficial and exist to serve self-esteem regulation; mutuality constrained by little genuine interest in others experiences and predominance of a need for personal gain. B. Pathological personality traits in the following domain: 1. Antagonism, characterized by: a. Grandiosity: Feelings of entitlement, either overt or covert; self-centeredness; firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others; condescending toward others. b. Attention seeking: Excessive attempts to attract and be the focus of the attention of others; admiration seeking. C. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual’s personality trait expression are relatively stable across time and consistent across situations. D. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual’s personality trait expression are not better understood as normative for the individual’s developmental stage or sociocultural environment. E. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual’s personality trait expression are not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., severe head trauma).7
Chuck DeGroat (When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse)
Most folks are doing the very best they can, and all they desire is to be cared for—especially at home. But many people don’t realize what they’re seeking, so they falsely perceive that more wealth, control of others, or the transient pleasures of addictive behaviors will make them feel happy and fulfilled. And often, money, fame, and career success—or the use of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or prescription medications— do bring the illusion of acceptance, freedom, and affection. Only when these individuals peel away the motivations that leave them participating in destructive behaviors do they identify their real needs.
Rebecca Linder Hintze (Healing Your Family History: 5 Steps to Break Free of Destructive Patterns)
Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, Kripalu yoga – the list of “cures” for our lack of resilience and related problems is endless. If you are overweight, alone, miserable at work or crippled by stress or anxiety or depression, there are hordes of gurus and experts chasing you with books and quick fixes. With their advice, guidance, motivation or inspiration, you can fix your problems. But make no mistake: They are always your problems. You alone are responsible for them. It follows that failing to fix your problems will always be your failure, your lack of will, motivation or strength. Galen, the second-century physician who ministered to Roman emperors, believed his medical treatments were effective. “All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time,” he wrote, “except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.” This is the way of the billion-dollar self-help industry: You are to blame when the guru’s advice does not produce the expected outcome, and by now, we are all familiar enough with self-help to know that expected outcomes are elusive. […] Personal explanations for success actually set us up for failure. TED Talks and talk shows full of advice on what to eat, what to think and how to live seldom work. Self-help fixes are like empty calories: The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science. We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavor. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses. […] The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviors.
Michael Ungar
there was still the overland menace as people and goods were set in motion by trade, pilgrimage, and labor migration. Already from the days of the Black Death, communities motivated by fear more than by reasoned medical philosophy had resorted to self-help by forming vigilante parties that patrolled city walls during times of plague, turning away outsiders with the threat of violence.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
With endless pharmacological supplies at our fingertips, we do not need to penetrate the motives behind our actions, feelings, transgressions, dreams, and phobias. High on chemical substances we can remain stagnated in an infantile mental state. Without introspection, we foreclose ourselves from gaining the insight that allows us to navigate adulthood’s ceaseless demands.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
This point notwithstanding, consistent with Holmes et al.’s (2005) emphasis in defining compartmentalization as “a deficit in the ability to deliberately control processes or actions that would normally be amenable to such control” (Holmes et al., p. 7), a particularly distressing variant of disintegrated or compartmentalized functions entails the perceived separation of will from action, that is, the dissociative compartmentalization of perceived agency. In other words, a person may experience a lack of normally expected conscious volitional control over his or her cognitive and behavioral–motor functions, with actions thus performed seemingly beyond the person’s own will. For example, a traumatized client described taking very high (though fortunately nonlethal) doses of prescription medications “against her will.” Specifically, despite her best intentions, she has frequently found that she cannot stop consuming the medication, the experience akin to her thoughts and actions seeming to be under dual control. Another traumatized client has described the experience of being without volitional control to stop acts of self-mutilation, which may, upon subsequent reflection, be understood as motivated by self-loathing and as epitomizing an act of aggression toward herself. In
Paul Frewen (Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
The Luftwaffe effectively “rented” slave labor from the SS both to build facilities and to operate manufacturing lines making V-2 rockets and other high-tech weaponry. The SS actually charged a per-day fee for each slave worker, set well below the average wage of a regular German citizen, and provided all services, such as guards, food, and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly, the workers used for the programs underwent shockingly brutal treatment, regardless of whether they built V-2 rockets in underground manufacturing facilities or constructed wind tunnels in frigid, windswept alpine valleys in Austria. The SS preferred to spend the least amount possible on their slaves to maximize their profits, feeding the men very little, dressing them in thin rags, and providing no medical treatment. The guards motivated the victims to work with shouting, threats, and constant blows and beatings.
Charles River Editors (Operation Paperclip: The History of the Secret Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America During and After World War II)
Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.
Angela Nagle (Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right)
This book reveals the complexity of nurses’ motivations for joining. It probes how humanitarian nursing within a Quaker-based organization challenged nurses’ perception of their role as purveyors of Western-based knowledge and standards, even as they confronted questions of medical ethics and unfamiliar cultural practices. The Gadabout nurses’ narratives are not solely about what happened to them and how they reacted to the challenges. Rather, they are about how men and women as categories of identity have been constructed within the gendered mainstream historiography, particularly the international relations discipline.1 The China Convoy suggests that nurses’ voices should be taken more seriously, not only within the scholarly literature but also within the contemporary policy formation process. Nurses have been and will remain key to the delivery of humanitarian assistance. It is my hope that this book will open avenues of scholarly inquiry within the history and practice of humanitarian nursing.
Susan Armstrong-Reid (China Gadabouts: New Frontiers of Humanitarian Nursing, 1941–51)
Why are the central nervous systems of mammals so much alike, and wouldn't it stand to reason that they serve precisely the same evolutionary purpose, motivating each creature to flee bodily harm and thereby perpetuate the species? If the purpose of pain is the same for us as for other animals, if the internal mechanisms of pain are the same, if the outward expressions of pain are the same, and if the medical treatments for pain are the same, why wouldn't the physical experience of pain be the same - and for that matter, the psychological experience of it as well?
Matthew Scully (Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy)
motivation follows action instead of the other way around.
Richard O'Connor (Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You)
True. But we can’t let that rule her out. She could have a contact here we don’t know about.’ Matthew scratches the back of his head. ‘And she may be too unwell for the motive to be rational. Do we have anything more on her medical condition?
Teresa Driscoll (Her Perfect Family)
Strength training has been shown to improve emotional makeup and to promote better sleep. It also builds self-esteem and self-efficacy. Researchers are still trying to determine the reasons why strength training has such a positive powerful effect on the mind yet are unanimous that it is as effective as medication at relieving depression.
Nick Swettenham (Total Fitness After 40: The 7 Life Changing Foundations You Need for Strength, Health and Motivation in your 40s, 50s, 60s and Beyond)
When you move beyond your 40th birthday, there are a number of lifestyle factors that should underpin your fitness lifestyle. Consider the following 7 factors and think about how you stack up in regard to them. Do you: Get regular (at least 6 monthly) medical checkups? Not smoke? Get regular exercise? Eat sensibly and in moderation? Strive to maintain a balanced weight? Know how to relax? Drink alcohol in moderation?
Nick Swettenham (Total Fitness After 40: The 7 Life Changing Foundations You Need for Strength, Health and Motivation in your 40s, 50s, 60s and Beyond)
Improving your sleep, energy levels, mood, attention span, body composition, motivation, self-confidence, self-efficacy, and quality of life starts by changing the food you put on your plate. Yes, the Whole30 eliminates cravings, corrects hormonal imbalances, fixes digestive issues, improves medical conditions, and strengthens the immune system.
Melissa Urban (The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom)
The truth about productivity is that it's not really about the apps, it's not really about having a perfect system or about being disciplined or motivated more than anyone else. When I think of my own life and how I do things like: YouTube channel, entrepreneurship, medical school, being a doctor, none of it feels like suffering, none of it feels like a grind. So, when my housemate says: "It's 11 o'clock at night, why are you still working?", it's always a bit surprising because it really doesn't feel like work because it's actually fun. The main insight that I've realized is that productivity isn't really about getting more things done, it's mostly about LEARNING TO ENJOY THE JOURNEY.
productivity, work
Some trust their snakes or bones. Some trust their herbs or medication. Some trust their wealth or health. Some trust their fame or jobs. Some trust their money or connection. Some trust their qualification or skills. Some trust their friends or partners. Some trust their doctors or witchdoctor. Some trust the internet or the news. Some trust their looks or beauty. Some trust themselves or their guts. Some trust what they had been given. But I am here today to remind you that. Jeremiah 17:7-8 “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
Courage will filter out most of the unnecessary worrying; you have to have trust that if you have something that requires medical attention there will be obvious signs motivating you to react.
Marc A. (Hypochondria Anonymous: Find the Power in You to Overcome Hypochondria)
Diagnostic inflation has led to an explosive growth in the use of psychotropic drugs; this then produced huge profits that have given the pharmaceutical industry the means and the motive to blow up the diagnostic bubble into an ever-expanding balloon.
Allen Frances (Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life)
It struck me, even at the time, that the basic hope of the conference was a very scholarly one. Many of the contributions and lectures were motivated by a touching faith in the collective memory of Christianity. They believed that the writings of the age of the Fathers could be sifted by scholars in such a way as to bring healing to the present. Understanding the Patristic age was like a remedium (to use a late Roman Latin term). A remedium was a homeopathic poultice—like a modern medical patch—which was thought to work slowly, and with almost occult power, to heal: to redress deep-seated imbalances; to fortify good humors; to smooth away the cramps and to soften the hard constrictions that wracked the body. It was hoped that a remedium could be concocted, from our renewed and ever-deeper knowledge of Patristic Christianity, that could be pressed against the fevered body of the church in our own times.
Peter Brown (Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History)
Complex PTSD is a result of prolonged or repeated trauma over a period of months or years. Here are some common symptoms of Complex PTSD: reliving trauma through flashbacks and nightmares dizziness or nausea when recalling memories avoiding situations or places that remind you of the trauma or abuser hyperarousal, which means being in a continual state of high alert the belief that the world is a dangerous place, a loss of faith and belief in the goodness of others a loss of trust in yourself or others difficulty sleeping being jumpy—sensitive to stimuli hypervigilance—constantly observing others’ behavior, searching for signs of bad behavior and clues that reveal bad intentions low self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence emotional regulation difficulties—you find yourself being more emotionally triggered than your usual way of being; you may experience intense anger or sadness or have thoughts of suicide preoccupation with an abuser—it is not uncommon to fixate on the abuser, the relationship with the abuser, or getting revenge for the abuse detachment from others—wanting to isolate yourself, withdraw from life challenges in relationships, including difficulty trusting others, possibly seeking out a rescuer, or even getting into another relationship with an abuser because it is familiar disassociation—feeling detached from yourself and your emotions depression—sadness and low energy, a lack of motivation toxic guilt and shame—a feeling that somehow you deserved to be abused, or that your failure to leave earlier is a sign of weakness destructive self-harming behavior—abusing drugs and alcohol is a common result of ongoing trauma; this can also include overeating to soothe and self-medicate. The flip side can be harming yourself through not eating. These behaviors develop during the period of trauma as a way to deal with or forget about the trauma and emotional pain.
Debbie Mirza (Worthy of Love: A Gentle and Restorative Path to Healing After Narcissistic Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 2))
The common responses are fright, flight or fight. Many allow their mental health issues to linger through fright. They keep their problem switch on in the background, just as a medical clinic reception keeps the radio playing: you know it’s there, but you are not quite listening. This can lead to paranoia and worsening of symptoms over time. Another group of people may decide to forcefully try and switch their problem off. They use flight to run away from their problem, turning to things like denial or being constantly busy to make their issues feel insignificant. The final group try to fight the problem. They do what they can to deal with their challenges but go about it in an unstructured manner. Fighting is great, it shows motivation and willingness to overcome the issue. But it needs structure and strategy. A boxer learns everything about their opponent and fights with a cool head. They employ structure when trying to win; we must do the same with our mental health.
Gaur Gopal Das (Energize Your Mind: A Monk’s Guide to Mindful Living)
Berwick captured this brilliantly in his article, “The Toxicity of Pay for Performance”: “Pay for performance” reduces intrinsic motivation. Many tasks, especially in health care, are potentially intrinsically satisfying. Relieving pain, answering questions, exercising manual dexterity, being confided in, working on a professional team, solving puzzles, and experiencing the role of a trusted authority—these are not at all bad ways to spend part of one’s day at work. Pride and joy in the work of caring is among the many motivations that do result in “performance” among health care professionals. In the rancorous debates about compensation, fees, and reimbursement that so occupy the time of health care leaders and clinicians today, it is all too easy to neglect, or even to doubt, the fact that nonfinancial and intrinsic rewards are important in the work of medical care. Unfortunately, neglecting intrinsic satisfiers in work can inadvertently diminish them.
Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
Discouraging cooperation and common purpose. Rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes the sense of common purpose as well as the social relationships that provide the unmeasureable motivation for cooperation and institutional effectiveness.7 Reward based on measured performance tends to promote not cooperation but competition. If the individuals or units respond to the incentives created, rather than aiding, assisting, and advising one another, they strive to maximize their own metrics, ignoring, or even sabotaging, their fellows. As Donald Berwick, a leading medical reformer, has recounted, One hospital CEO described to me his system of profit-center management, in which middle management bonuses depended on local budget performance. I asked him if one of his managers would transfer resources from his department to another’s if it would help the organization as a whole. “Yes,” the CEO answered honestly, “if he were crazy.
Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.
David Givot (Sirens, Lights, and Lawyers: The Law & Other Really Important Stuff EMS Providers Never Learned in School)
Financial contracts are typically struck between someone who wants to shift value to the present and someone who wants to shift value to the future. There are two broad reasons for shifting money to the present: consumption and production. The consumption motive is the need for cash to cover current expenses, to buy food, to pay medical bills, or to deal with some other unforeseen cost.
William N. Goetzmann (Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible)
Signs of the Highly Sensitive Person – A Helpful List How many of the following describe you? 1. A tendency to feel particularly overwhelmed in noisy environments 2. A preference for smaller gatherings of people rather than large crowds 3. A good track record of picking up on other people’s moods and motives 4. An ability to notice little changes in the environment 5. A tendency to be easily moved by music, books, films, and other media 6. Heightened sensitivity to hunger, pain, medication, and caffeine 7. A need to recharge and relax alone on a regular basis 8. An appreciation of good manners and politeness 9. Difficulty in refusing others’ requests for fear of hurting their feelings 10. Difficulty in forgiving yourself for even the smallest mistakes 11. Perfectionism and imposter syndrome 12. Trouble handling conflict and criticism
Judy Dyer (Empath and The Highly Sensitive: 2 in 1 Bundle)
Does What I Think Really Matter? Ronnie Littleton Pause for just a moment and try to not think. Keep trying. It appears to be impossible to stop thinking, doesn’t it? Thinking is a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Not only that, our thoughts actually shape who we are, what we believe, what we do, and how we treat others. If our thoughts are this powerful, it seems obvious that we should avoid incorrect thoughts, for incorrect thoughts will lead to problems as we make decisions and form opinions based on bad information. On the other hand, correct thoughts will lead to good outcomes. This is why the Apostle Paul commands believers to transform their thinking (Rm 12:2). George Washington, our first president, became ill in 1799. One of the treatments prescribed for his illness was bloodletting—cutting open a vein to allow a specific amount of blood to flow out. Bloodletting was a fairly common practice at the time. It was believed that bad blood was the cause of fever, and that by letting some out, the fever would be relieved. We now know that this was not just incorrect thinking, it was dangerous. A wrong belief led to a wrong practice that may have actually hastened Washington’s death. The treatment was intended to heal, but was actually harmful. The physician who treated Washington had a good motive for his actions, and no doubt his course of treatment would have been supported by his medical colleagues; good motives and consensus of opinion, however, cannot make up for bad ideas. Since our ideas, opinions, and feelings have a big impact on what we do, and since they may be mistaken even if they match what everyone around us believes, where can we turn to know for certain what is right? One thing we can do is train ourselves to think logically. Logic is the study of reasoning principles—in other words, how we make valid inferences. In many cases it allows us to identify where our thinking has gone wrong and where we have bought into beliefs that are false. Nothing that is true can be illogical, so the use of logic is a filter for untruth. Logic and truth are not the same things, however. Think of logic as the plastic container that holds the milk in your refrigerator. The milk represents truth (a belief that corresponds to reality). If the plastic jug is full of holes, it could never hold the milk. On the other hand, if the container is sound, it will hold the milk. Now, just because the milk jug is valid does not necessarily mean that it has any milk in it, or that the milk is okay to drink. In a similar way, you can be a very logical person and yet miss the truth because of biases or inadequate information. In such cases, your wrong ideas may lead to bad consequences, such as wrong beliefs about God. Thus, we must always think logically and consult the sure source of ultimate truth: the Bible. Since what you think matters now and forever, you cannot afford to do otherwise.
Sean McDowell (Apologetics Study Bible for Students)
The sheer numbers associated with chronic disease, the magnitude of the medical and financial iceberg, make a mockery of this approach. The toll of the seven most common chronic diseases, in costs and lost productivity, was $4.2 trillion in the United States in 2012, up from $1.3 trillion in 2003.4 Chronic diseases account for more than 65% of corporate health-care costs. In a single year, there were almost 0.5 million new diabetes diagnoses for Americans ages twenty to forty-four, and 1 million new diabetics aged forty-five to sixty-five. Those are just the people who felt bad enough to see a doctor. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, which means their bodies are teetering on the edge of a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, and limb amputations if it isn’t controlled.5 Those people can be pulled back from the brink to some kind of normal future if they decide to make some significant changes in their lives. Unfortunately, 65% of employers in a large 2011 survey cited the difficulty of motivating employees to change their behavior as their top health-care challenge.
J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
Chemically induced joy comes at a cost. That cost can be high. Very, very high. So high that you’re going to think twice after reading what science has to say about drug use. One study found that adolescents who smoke just a couple of joints of marijuana show changes in their brains. That’s not a couple of years of smoking or the decades that some adults rack up. It’s just two joints. A research team led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor and psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, discovered that teenagers using cannabis had a nearly 40% greater risk of depression and a 50% greater risk of suicidal ideation in adulthood. Dr. Gobbi stated that “given the large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis, the risk in the population becomes very big. About 7% of depression is probably linked to the use of cannabis in adolescence, which translates into more than 400,000 cases.” The research that revealed these startling numbers was not just a single study of adolescent marijuana use. It was a meta-analysis and review of 11 studies with a total of 23,317 teenage subjects followed through young adulthood. Further, Gobbi’s team only reviewed studies that provided information on depression in the subjects prior to their cannabis use. “We considered only studies that controlled for [preexisting] depression,” said Dr. Gobbi. “They were not depressed before using marijuana, so they probably weren’t using it to self-medicate.” Marijuana use preceded depression. The specific findings of Gobbi’s research include: The risk of depression associated with marijuana use in teens below age 18 is 1.4 times higher than among nonusers. The risk of suicidal thoughts is 1.5 times higher. The likelihood that teen marijuana users will attempt suicide is 3.46 times greater. In adults with prolonged marijuana use, the wiring of the brain degrades. Areas affected include the hippocampus (learning and memory), insula (compassion), and prefrontal cortex (executive functions). The authors of one study stated that “regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex; these regions are rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors and functionally associated with motivational, emotional, and affective processing. Furthermore, these changes correlate with the frequency of cannabis use . . . [while the] . . . age of onset of drug use also influences the magnitude of these changes.” A large number of studies show that cannabis use both increases anxiety and depression and leads to worse health. Key parts of your brain shrink more, based on how early you began smoking weed, and how often you smoke it. That’s a “high” price to pay.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
advocate that people self-identify as disabled for the purposes of gaining a group identity (postmodern theme), to engage in postmodern disruption of the knowledge-production capacity of medical science (postmodern knowledge principle), or as a politically motivated disruption of the dominant belief that disability is a thing to be avoided or treated (postmodern political principle). It is unclear how any of this can be helpful to disabled people.
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
my central motive consists of a fierce belief that something must be done to rectify the miserable inadequacies of current medical responses to ovarian cancer.
Susan Gubar (Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer)
As a society we need to stop taking our skincare advice from people whose motives for recommending specific products are almost entirely financially driven; this includes skincare companies, journalists, bloggers, beauty therapists, YouTubers and even some medical professionals. I refer to this seemingly diverse group of people collectively as "Big Skincare".
Natalia Spierings (Skintelligent: What you really need to know to get great skin)
While these medications may make slight alterations to the neurobiology of your brain, they do not necessarily have the power to influence your mind. To truly recover from depression—or any other mental illness—you have to find the motivation to keep moving forward, to dream, to hope, and to embrace not only what is practical but what is possible. Those feelings are the ones that will carry you through the darkest nights into a brighter tomorrow, with the knowledge and faith that life is beautiful and good. Unfortunately, no pill can give you that.
Gregory Scott Brown (The Self-Healing Mind: An Essential Five-Step Practice for Overcoming Anxiety and Depression, and Revitalizing Your Life)
In the third chapter of this “Song of the Lord,” Krishna instructs Arjuna—and us—in what is called “skillful action.” Krishna argues that activity is an inseparable attribute of finite existence. Nothing that exists in the realm of Nature is, in the last analysis, inactive. The cosmos (prakriti), which is composed of three types of primary qualities (guna), is a perpetual motion machine. If it ceased to move even for a moment, the cosmos would collapse. This view coincides with the findings of modern physics, which has revealed to us a universe that is continually vibrating. Therefore, concludes Krishna, it does not make much sense to want to abstain from action. Mere inactivity is not the answer to our existential problems. It is fine to renounce the world and dedicate one’s life to contemplating the Divine, providing one can really do it. But few people have the necessary stamina for the rigors of such a solitary lifestyle. Besides, argues Krishna, there is a better way to Self-realization (or God-realization) than renunciation. And that is to continue to be active but to act free from egoic attachment. In this way, the continuation of human life is ensured, while at the same time it is being transformed by one’s self-transcending disposition. Krishna’s activist gospel, then, does not ask us to carry on as usual. True, the karma-yogin continues to get up in the morning, use the bathroom, eat breakfast, go to work, interact with people during the day, return home, eat dinner, spend time with the family, read, listen to music, make love, and sleep. But he endeavors, by degrees, to do all this with a subtle yet significant difference: All of these actions are engaged in the spirit of self-surrender. In other words, they are all opportunities to go beyond mere egoic preferences and fixations and to cultivate instead quiet awareness and communion with the Divine. An important aspect of the practice of Karma-Yoga is the nonneurotic disinterest in what Krishna calls the “fruit” (phala) of one’s actions. Ordinarily, our actions are governed by so-called ulterior motives—those mostly hidden expectations that would see us rewarded for our deeds. For instance, by putting in an extra hour at work, we secretly, or otherwise, hope to impress the boss. By taking our children to sporting events on Saturdays, we hope for them to share our own excitement, or by sending them to medical school, we seek to live out our own dreams through their lives. By helping an elderly or blind person cross the street, we expect, below the threshold of our conscious mind, to be thanked and thus receive an emotional boost. Or, more subtly, we may do things out of a sense of duty, but without heart. In that case, our actions remain as self-involved as ever. Grim determination is no substitute for the spirit of self-transcendence.
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
I think of an Afghan driver I once had, a medical student who spoke whimsically of the homeland he loved so dearly but so badly wanted to leave. 'We Afghans are unlucky people,' the driver had whispered. "But we would be the luckiest people if the wars ever left—look outside at this magical place.
Hollie McKay (Afghanistan: The End of the U.S. Footprint and the Rise of the Taliban Rule)
No. 1, when you ask who’s interested in this, the usual answer is, terminally ill people with excruciating pain. False. Factually not true. It tends to be a preoccupation of people who are depressed or hopeless for other reasons. No surprise, actually, if you look at what leads to suicide: hopelessness and depression. You have to look at euthanasia or assisted suicide as more like suicide than like a good death. Second, this notion that there’s no slippery slope, as advocates have long claimed? Totally wrong. Look at Belgium and the Netherlands: First, it’s accepted for adults who are competent and give consent. Then, it’s “We’re going to extend it to neonates with genetic defects, and adolescents.” Any time we do anything in medicine, it’s the same way: We develop an intervention for a narrow group of people, and once it’s well accepted, it gets expanded. I think it’s false to say, “We can hold the line here.” It doesn’t work that way. Third, people say this is a quick, reliable, painless intervention. No medical intervention in history is quick, reliable, painless and has no flaws. In the Netherlands, there’s about a 17 to 20 percent rate of problems, something screwing up. Initially, when the Oregon people published — “We have no problems. Every case went flawlessly!” — you knew the data was wrong. It had to be wrong. Either you’re not getting every case, so the denominator was wrong, or people are lying. There’s nobody who does a procedure, not even blood draws, and it’s perfect every time. So this idea that this is quick, reliable and painless is nonsense. And the last and most important point is: You want to legalize these interventions to improve end-of-life care in this country? That’s your motivation and this is your method? PS: I don’t think people argue that–— ZE: [interrupting] Oh, people do argue that! That is the justification for these procedures: It’s going to improve end-of-life care and give people control. The problem is, even in countries that have legalized it for a long time, at best 3 percent of people die this way in the Netherlands and Belgium. At best, 10 percent express interest in it. That is not a way to improve end-of-life care. You don’t focus lots of attention and effort on 3 percent. It’s the 97 percent, if you want to improve care. The typical response is, we can do both. Hmmm. Every system I’ve ever seen has a bandwidth problem: You can only do so much. We ought to focus our attention on the vast, vast majority, 97 percent of people, for whom this is not the right intervention and get that right — and we are far from that. I don’t think legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are the way to go. It’s a big, big distraction.
Paula Span (Ezekiel Emanuel: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single))
failure is not the end, but rather, only stimulates the next beginning. You cannot be afraid of it. It is one of your greatest motivators.
Gerald D. Buckberg (Solving the Mysteries of Heart Disease: Life-Saving Answers Ignored by the Medical Establishment)
If you talk with any patient, physician, or medical practice leader about the practice of medicine, you quickly realize that all three have the same thing in common: as much as they recognize the significance of the science of medicine and the importance of the business of medicine, the part of medicine that’s most important to them is the human side—the big-hearted, patient-focused, high-touch, active-listening, caring, compassionate, empathetic part of medicine that has been at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship from the very beginning. For physicians, it is the place where experience, instinct, and passion for the skill of medicine converge. For patients, it is the home of care, connection, and communication—the things that make them feel valued, listened to, and cared for in moments of pain, fear, and vulnerability. For administrators, it’s the place where value and impact can be seen and measured, where the sense of purpose and meaning that motivates them are found.
Halee Fischer-Wright (Back To Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine)
The emotional states associated with the heart include some that every life would benefit from: Empathy, which makes us feel what someone else is feeling Compassion, which motivates us to extend lovingkindness Forgiveness, which wipes the slate clean of old grievances and wounding Sacrifice, which allows us to put someone else’s good above our own Devotion, which inspires reverence for higher values None of these states is a term in cardiology, yet they have medical consequences
Deepak Chopra (The Healing Self: Supercharge your immune system and stay well for life)
Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.
John Carreyrou (author)