Medicine Student Quotes

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

A doctor should be a clown at heart, a scientist at brain and a mother at conscience.

Medicine, and Law, and Philosophy - You've worked your way through every school, Even, God help you, Theology, And sweated at it like a fool. Why labour at it any more? You're no wiser now than you were before. You're Master of Arts, and Doctor too, And for ten years all you've been able to do Is lead your students a fearful dance Through a maze of error and ignorance. And all this misery goes to show There's nothing we can ever know. Oh yes you're brighter than all those relics, Professors and Doctors, scribblers and clerics, No doubts or scruples to trouble you, Defying hell, and the Devil too. But there's no joy in self-delusion; Your search for truth ends in confusion. Don't imagine your teaching will ever raise The minds of men or change their ways. And as for worldly wealth, you have none - What honour or glory have you won? A dog could stand this life no more. And so I've turned to magic lore; The spirit message of this art Some secret knowledge might impart. No longer shall I sweat to teach What always lay beyond my reach; I'll know what makes the world revolve, Its mysteries resolve, No more in empty words I'll deal - Creation's wellsprings I'll reveal!

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute? For many the answer seemed radical at first. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels?

The world doesn't need more smart doctors, it needs more warm and wise doctors. Be the wisdom yourself - be the warmth yourself, and be the doctor that the doctors have forgotten to be, for it is time to save medicine, to save humanity.

The midpoint in medicine between excessive emotional involvement with patients and a complete lack of empathy is not a simple one to locate.

Medicine today, though, as with related fields such as nutrition, is taught mostly untethered from its history. Students are taught what to believe but not always the evidence on which these beliefs are based, and so oftentimes the beliefs cannot be questioned. And

As a doctor, you don’t practice medicine, rather you become the medicine yourself.

There is no painkiller as effective as love, no anti-depressant as soothing as cheer, no defibrillator as powerful as wisdom.

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

MEDICINE means Mercy - Empathy - Dare - Integrity - Care - Ingenuity - Nobility - and Ethics.

Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?

Thus, whatever the medical student has been taught, and even genuinely believes, about the ideals of medicine, the primacy of empathy, the value of the doctor-patient relationship--all of this is swamped once he or she steps into the wards. [...] It's no wonder that empathy gets trounced in the actual world of clinical medicine; everything that empathy requires seems to detract from daily survival.

By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to re-write our commencement oath - a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers - several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients' interests above our own. (The rest of us didn't allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But thats the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling).

Medicine is a demanding mistress, yet she is faithful, generous, and true, She gives me the privilege of seeing patients and of teaching students at the bedside, and thereby she gives meaning to everything I do.

Be aware of the whole domain of sickness - be aware of its implications in human life - be aware of its farthest reach in the life of the patient as well as the lives of the next of kin - be aware of its deepest roots, for that very awareness is the very foundation of true diagnosis, which automatically brings along the awareness of wellness.

One day in my pharmacology class, we were discussing the possibility of legalizing marijuana. The class was pretty evenly divided between those that advocated legalizing marijuana and those that did not. The professor said he wanted to hear from a few people on both sides of the argument. A couple students had the opportunity to stand in front of the class and present their arguments. One student got up and spoke about how any kind of marijuana use was morally wrong and how nobody in the class could give him any example of someone who needed marijuana. A small girl in the back of the classroom raised her hand and said that she didn’t want to get up, but just wanted to comment that there are SOME situations in which people might need marijuana. The same boy from before spoke up and said that she needed to back up her statements and that he still stood by the fact that there wasn’t anyone who truly needed marijuana. The same girl in the back of the classroom slowly stood up. As she raised her head to look at the boy, I could physically see her calling on every drop of confidence in her body. She told us that her husband had cancer. She started to tear up, as she related how he couldn’t take any of the painkillers to deal with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments. His body was allergic and would have violent reactions to them. She told us how he had finally given in and tried marijuana. Not only did it help him to feel better, but it allowed him to have enough of an appetite to get the nutrients he so desperately needed. She started to sob as she told us that for the past month she had to meet with drug dealers to buy her husband the only medicine that would take the pain away. She struggled every day because according to society, she was a criminal, but she was willing to do anything she could to help her sick husband. Sobbing uncontrollably now, she ran out of the classroom. The whole classroom sat there in silence for a few minutes. Eventually, my professor asked, “Is there anyone that thinks this girl is doing something wrong?” Not one person raised their hand.

In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years.

Several years ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota identified 568 men and women over the age of seventy who were living independently but were at high risk of becoming disabled because of chronic health problems, recent illness, or cognitive changes. With their permission, the researchers randomly assigned half of them to see a team of geriatric nurses and doctors—a team dedicated to the art and science of managing old age. The others were asked to see their usual physician, who was notified of their high-risk status. Within eighteen months, 10 percent of the patients in both groups had died. But the patients who had seen a geriatrics team were a quarter less likely to become disabled and half as likely to develop depression. They were 40 percent less likely to require home health services. These were stunning results. If scientists came up with a device—call it an automatic defrailer—that wouldn’t extend your life but would slash the likelihood you’d end up in a nursing home or miserable with depression, we’d be clamoring for it. We wouldn’t care if doctors had to open up your chest and plug the thing into your heart. We’d have pink-ribbon campaigns to get one for every person over seventy-five. Congress would be holding hearings demanding to know why forty-year-olds couldn’t get them installed. Medical students would be jockeying to become defrailulation specialists, and Wall Street would be bidding up company stock prices. Instead, it was just geriatrics. The geriatric teams weren’t doing lung biopsies or back surgery or insertion of automatic defrailers. What they did was to simplify medications. They saw that arthritis was controlled. They made sure toenails were trimmed and meals were square. They looked for worrisome signs of isolation and had a social worker check that the patient’s home was safe. How do we reward this kind of work? Chad Boult, the geriatrician who was the lead investigator of the University of Minnesota study, can tell you. A few months after he published the results, demonstrating how much better people’s lives were with specialized geriatric care, the university closed the division of geriatrics.

The best prayer is repentance. The best sermon is character. The best mirror is reality. The best shield is faith. The best hammer is will. The best ammunition is truth. The best fortress is reason. The best school is life. The best attorney is justice. The best counselor is experience. The best warrior is courage. The best teacher is patience. The best student is humility. The best prophet is tomorrow. The best general is strategy. The best priest is piety. The best physician is nature. The best herb is peace. The best medicine is forgiveness. The best wealth is happiness. The best angel is mercy. The best companion is prudence. The best light is wisdom. The best religion is love.

There may be medical tools in your hands to treat the patient, but those hands must be that of a loving, warm and conscientious human being.

Wellness is not the lack of sickness, but the capacity to overcome sickness.

A life saved is a family saved.

As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture.

An average doctor saves a body, a good doctor saves a being.

there is something about medical education and something about what the students go through which blunts this empathy with which they arrive.

Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.

MEDICINE means Mercy – Empathy – Dare – Integrity – Care – Ingenuity – and Ethics.

Virchow would write, ‘My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.’ He had a knack for aphorism. ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.’ ‘It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.’ ‘Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way to make a living, but to ensure the health of the community.’ ‘The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.’ This last was Farmer’s favorite. Virchow put the world together in a way that made sense to Farmer. ‘Virchow had a comprehensive vision,’ he said. ‘Pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology. My model.

The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else. We were fulfilling the expectations that had been set for us: the sons of doctors were expected to become doctors so as to honor the tradition; the sons of immigrants were expected to become doctors in order to make a better life for their families; the sons who had been driven to work the hardest and be the smartest were expected to become doctors because back in the day medicine was still where the smart kids went.

Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. That changed in 1876, when, after a tenacious fight led by Britain’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the law was changed to prohibit women’s exclusion from medical schools. Now, more than 140 years later, female medical students outnumber men. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more

Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school … The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

Understanding sickness in its whole form, reach and impact, automatically brings along the insight into wellness, just like understanding chaos with all its nuances brings along the true practical perception of harmony and the means to achieve it.

If you already have the student loans or don’t want to get a loan in the first place, look into the “underserved areas” programs. The government will pay for school or pay off your student loans if you will go to work in an underserved area. These areas are typically rural or inner-city areas. Most of these programs are for law and medicine. If you are in nursing, work a few years in an inner-city hospital with the less fortunate, and you will get a free education, courtesy of the federal government.

And as for those high school students who tell me they would rather be a cat than an MD because they prefer to deal with animals and not to deal with people, I let them know they have it all wrong. Veterinarians get to work with animals. We get to work for people.

birch – hope butterflies – change, transformation, inner growth cypress – mourning daisies – innocence, purity dragonflies – ancestors fireflies – life, sexuality hummingbirds – hope and beauty, the sun in disguise, infinity in the flight of their wings phoenix – rebirth poppies – remembrance raven – in some cultures death, in some cultures a bringer of light associated with Creation rose (red) – romantic love rose (yellow) – friendship sage – powerful cleansing sweetgrass – a grandmother medicine sycamore – hidden treasure

Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparation, where the trip was presented as a learning experience and a process of self-discovery. They all took place in safe, supportive environments. They generally did not fit the stereotypical model of teenagers dropping acid at a rock concert, looking for awesome visuals and good vibes.

There is no greater beast than envy, no greater thief than fear, no greater enemy than greed, no greater predator than wrath, and no greater poison than bitterness. There is no greater student than curiosity, no greater professor than intelligence, no greater schoolbook than experience, no greater exam than understanding, and no greater classroom than life. There is no greater preacher than integrity, no greater warrior than courage, no greater friend than contentment, no greater angel than mercy, and no greater medicine than love.

In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years. After his death in 1909, the donor—a man ironically named Dr. Addison Davis Hard—confessed to the underhanded deed in a letter to Medical World.)

Doctor's Sonnet A doctor is one who's gentle as a bird, A doctor is one who's brave as a soldier, A doctor is one who's amusing as a clown, A doctor is one who's caring as a mother. Treating the sick is not a comfort job, It is a difficult life without leisure and lure. If all you want are wealth and tranquility, Trade in your medical license for a liquor store. The world is filled with doctors most cold, Many don't practice medicine but self-centricity. Instruments and intellect don't make a doctor, Without warmth all pills lose their efficacy. Healthcare means aid first talk rules later. Better a kindhearted fool than a heartless monster.

If you are a student, be also a student of the body ... realizing that a broad chest, a muscular pair of arms, and two sinewy legs, will be just as much credit to you, and stand you in hand through your future life, equally with your geometry, your history, your classics, your law, medicine, or divinity. Let nothing divert you from your duty to your body

My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn’t miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat, taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment, that he sent to me when I was nine or ten. He had to give the cat away when he was elected pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the pope could not keep a pet.

Then he asked me to tell him some stories about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That's when I realized that I am not Ketut Liyer's English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man- I am his company. I'm somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn't had much of a chance to see it.

Medicine Means (The Sonnet) MEDICINE means Mercy, MEDICINE means Empathy, MEDICINE means Dare, MEDICINE means Integrity, MEDICINE means Care, MEDICINE means Ingenuity, MEDICINE means Nobility, MEDICINE means Ethicality. Medicine is not a profession, Medicine is but a sacred calling. An average doctor saves a body, A good doctor saves a being. Pathogens exist to cash in on sickness. A doctor exists to be lost among patients.

The very fact that these doctors continuing to be doctors--highly successful ones--despite their errors and their accompanying assaults on their self-definion would itself be a potent lesson to the students and interns. It is possible to hold one's head up after an error, to admit that errors are part and parcel of human existence, even in medicine. It is possible to see the error as an aspect of oneself, not the defining characteristic of oneself.

William Osler, the physician who wrote The Principles and Practice of Medicine in 1892, once told a group of medical students: Banish the future. Live only for the hour and its allotted work. Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day; for surely our plain duty is, as Carlyle says, “Not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body:             The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

But the problem arises when instead of setting aside our natural reactions, they are denied altogether. Then the culture simply becomes superhuman. And thus is the realm of the superhuman there is no room for human frailty, and admission of it by one risks revealing the illusion of the many. So no one speaks up, and as a result each person believes that she is alone in her experience. To that end, we are left in a profession of untouchable greatness and infallibility, but one whose members kill themselves more than others.

The establishment of medical studies in the university (as opposed to some other possible institutional home) created a linkage between medicine and other branches of knowledge that profoundly shaped the development of medicine. Specifically, a degree in the faculty of arts came to be a typical (if not quite universal) prerequisite for medical studies; and this meant that medical students came equipped with the logical and philosophical tools that would transform medicine (for better or for worse) into a rigorous, scholastic enterprise.

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools—far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said, computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.

He [Paracelsus] was a Swiss, a queer mixture of a man, of keenest intellect and coarsest fiber, an unusual combination. Like most students of these times, he led a wandering life. That was the only way one could keep in touch with what was going on; there were no scientific periodicals, no newspapers and where a postal service existed, it was uncertain and expensive. Consequently, most of the university students, the professors as well, and many physicians wandered from one university to another. Most of these itinerant students were true vagabonds, begging and stealing for their livelihood.

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

and pulled to a stop. He turned to Candy and kissed her—their first kiss. From then on, Ben and Candy were inseparable. They did their homework together. They encouraged each other. They were in love. * * * During his final year of college, Ben applied to medical schools. Unlike many of his classmates who were worried about which medical school would accept them, Ben was confident that he would go to the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He believed so firmly that God wanted him to be a doctor that he never doubted he would be accepted. One day another student who was agonizing about his own medical school applications turned to Ben and asked, “Carson, aren’t you worried?

This therapeutic approach translated directly into the Buddha’s empathic art of teaching. Instead of pronouncing one doctrine supposed to fit all, he responded differently to each of his students, and was renowned for tailoring his insights and advice to their particular inclinations and needs. So the great Sage was said to listen to each student as his only child, and offer various teachings (symbolically numbered at 84,000) like so many medicines for the different forms of suffering that ail people of all kinds. This interpersonal way of teaching is embodied in the very idea of what it means to belong to the Buddha’s community, in his day and in ours. Entry into the Buddha’s care is said to begin with the act of personally asking for his guidance and advice, an act known as “taking refuge.

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.' In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease than black patients are. When asked to read case studies of two patients complaining of pain, one white and one black, the respondents who had endorsed more false beliefs were more likely to believe that the black patient felt less pain, and undertreated them accordingly.

I've studied, alas, philosophy, law and medicine, recto and verso, and now I regret it, theology also, oh God, how hard I've slaved away, with what result? Poor foolish old man, I'm no whit wiser than when I began! I've got a Master of Arts degree, on top of that a PhD, for ten long years, around and about, upstairs, downstairs, in and out, I've led my students by the nose with what result? That nobody knows, or ever shall know, the tiniest crumb! Which is why I feel completely undone. Of course I'm cleverer than these stuffed shirts, these Doctors, M.A.s, scribes and priests, I'm not bothered by a doubt or a scruple, I'm not afraid of Hell or the Devil--but the consequence is, my mirth's all gone; no longer can I fool myself I'm able to teach anyone how to be better, love true worth; I've got no money or property, worldly honors or celebrity. A dog wouldn't put up with this life! Which is why I've turned to magic, seeking to know, by ways occult, from ghostly mouths spells difficult,

Seeing the life force in human beings brings medicine [and education and healing] closer to gardening than to carpentry. I don't fix a rosebush. A rosebush is a living process, and as a student of that process, I can learn to prune, to nurture and cooperate with it in ways that allow it best to 'happen,' to maximize the life force in it even in the presence of disease [and difficulty and pain]. Simply trusting process has a great power. A colleague of mine was telling me about the birth of her grandchild. At one point in a long and difficult labor, her daughter had called out to her for help. My colleague experienced this as a moment of impotence, feeling that there was nothing that she could do to fix things. She had sat there holding her child's hand, trusting the process of birth and feeling that this was not enough. But perhaps it is. The trust of process that comes from personal knowledge and experience is really the foundation of helping and comforting one another. Without it all of our actions are driven by fear. Fear is the friction in all transitions.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of Bayes’s theorem comes from a riddle that a mathematics teacher that I knew would pose to his students on the first day of their class. Suppose, he would ask, you go to a roadside fair and meet a man tossing coins. The first toss lands “heads.” So does the second. And the third, fourth . . . and so forth, for twelve straight tosses. What are the chances that the next toss will land “heads” ? Most of the students in the class, trained in standard statistics and probability, would nod knowingly and say: 50 percent. But even a child knows the real answer: it’s the coin that is rigged. Pure statistical reasoning cannot tell you the answer to the question—but common sense does. The fact that the coin has landed “heads” twelve times tells you more about its future chances of landing “heads” than any abstract formula. If you fail to use prior information, you will inevitably make foolish judgments about the future. This is the way we intuit the world, Bayes argued. There is no absolute knowledge; there is only conditional knowledge. History repeats itself—and so do statistical patterns. The past is the best guide to the future.

It is tragic, too, that students now describe themselves as mentally ill when facing what are the routine demands of student life and independent living. The NUS survey reports that students' feelings of crippling mental distress are primarily course-related and due to academic pressure. In 2013, in response to that year's NUS mental health survey, an article cheerily entitled 'Feeling worthless, hopeless ... who'd be a university student in Britain?' listed one young writer's anxiety-inducing student woes that span the whole length of her course: 'Grueling interview processes are not unusual, especially for courses like medicine, dentistry, and veterinary science, or for institutions like Oxbridge'. And then: 'Deadlines come thick and fast for first-year students, and for their final-year counterparts, the recession beckons'. Effectively, the very requirements of just being a student are typified as inducing mental illness. It can be hard to have sympathy with such youthful wimpishness. But I actually don't doubt the sincerity of these 'severe' symptoms experienced by stressed-out students. That is what is most worrying--they really are feeling over-anxious about minor inconveniences and quite proper academic pressure.

Well then, first would be the abalone and sea urchin- the bounty of the sea! Ah, I see! This foam on top is kombu seaweed broth that's been whipped into a mousse!" "Mm! I can taste the delicate umami flavors seeping into my tongue!" "The fish meat was aged for a day wrapped in kombu. The seaweed pulls just enough of the moisture out of the meat, allowing it to keep longer, a perfect technique for a bento that needs to last. Hm! Next looks to be bonito. ...!" What rich, powerful umami!" Aha! This is the result of several umami components melding together. The glutamic acid in the kombu from the previous piece is mixing together in my mouth with the inosinic acid in the bonito! "And, like, I cold aged this bonito across two days. Aging fish and meats boosts their umami components, y'know. In other words, the true effect of this bento comes together in your mouth... as you eat it in order from one end to the other." "Next is a row... that looks to be made entirely from vegetables. But none of them use a single scrap of seaweed. The wrappers around each one are different vegetables sliced paper-thin!" "Right! This bento totally doesn't go for any heavy foods." "Next comes the sushi row that practically cries out that it's a main dish... raw cold-aged beef sushi!" Th-there it is again! The powerful punch of umami flavor as two components mix together in my mouth! "Hm? Wait a minute. I understand the inosinic acid comes from the beef... but where is the glutamic acid?" "From the tomatoes." "Tomatoes? But I don't see any..." "They're in there. See, I first put them in a centrifuge. That broke them down into their component parts- the coloring, the fiber, and the jus. I then filtered the jus to purify it even further. Then I put just a few drops on each piece of veggie sushi." "WHAT THE HECK?!" "She took an ingredient and broke it down so far it wasn't even recognizable anymore? Can she even do that?" Appliances like the centrifuge and cryogenic grinder are tools that were first developed to be used in medicine, not cooking. Even among pro chefs, only a handful are skilled enough to make regular use of such complex machines! Who would have thought a high school student was capable of mastering them to this degree! "And last but not least we have this one. It's sea bream with some sort of pink jelly... ... resting on top of a Chinese spoon." That pink jelly was a pearl of condensed soup stock! Once it popped inside my mouth... ... it mixed together with the sea bream sushi until it tasted like- "Sea bream chazuke!

There are forty-eight physicians and surgeons, but not all are lecturers. Including yourself, there are twenty-seven students of medicine. Each clerk is apprenticed to a series of different physicians. The apprenticeships vary in length for different individuals, and so does the entire clerkship. You become a candidate for oral examination whenever the bastardly faculty decides you are ready. If you pass, they address you as Hakim. If you fail, you remain a student and must work toward another chance.” “How long have you been here?” Karim glowered, and Rob knew he had asked the wrong question. “Seven years. I’ve taken examinations twice. Last year, I failed the section on philosophy. My second attempt was three weeks ago, when I made a poor thing of questions on jurisprudence. What should I care about the history of logic or the precedents of the law? I’m already a good physician.” He sighed bitterly. “In addition to classes in medicine you must attend lectures in law, theology, and philosophy.

A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine set out on a thirty-year study to find if a single related cause existed for five major issues: mental illness, hypertension, malignant tumors, coronary heart disease, and suicide. After studying 1,377 students over thirty years, the most prevalent single cause of all five illnesses was not what you may think. Diet? Exercise? Not at all. They found instead that the most significant predictor of these five tragedies was a lack of closeness to the parents, especially the father.24

Shamans, as the classicist E.R. Dodds defines them, have "received a call to a religious life. As a result of this call [they undergo] a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex." Once the shaman emerges from this religious training, he possesses, according to Dodds, the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation. In that condition he is not thought...to be possessed by an alien spirit; but his own soul is thought to leave the body and travel to distant parts, most often to the spirit world. A shaman...has the power of bilocation. From these experiences, narrated by him in extempore song, he derives skill in divination, religious poetry, and magical medicine which makes him socially important. He becomes the repository of a supernormal wisdom. Thus, shamans seek a balance between the mythical/magical and the real Earth; that is, they are students of the plants, animals, rivers, and the rest of nature. They instinctively feel and see magic in the state of nature and have an intensified intimacy with nature beyond any of their lay counterparts in society-their selves are fractally enmeshed with the patterns of the natural world. Not only do shamans move between the normal and supernormal, between the human and natural worlds, they also develop a heightened state of empathy with their fellow human beings.

William Osler, often referred to as the father of modern medicine, told a graduating class of medical students: "A distressing feature in the life of which you are about to enter...is the uncertainty which pertains not alone to our science and art, but to the very hopes and fears which make us men. In seeking out the absolute truth we aim for the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions.

Most so-called doctors may boastfully proclaim to you that you must be concerned about making a lot of money in the practice of medicine, but keep in mind, that's precisely what practice of medicine is not about. So, reply to them with utmost realization of the purpose of medicine, "if you want to make a lot of money, then you should better go into business, not in medicine.

It appears that the probabilistic sciences of psychology and medicine teach their students to apply statistical and methodological rules to both scientific and everyday-life problems, whereas the nonprobabilistic science of chemistry and the nonscientific discipline of the law do not affect their students in these respects (p. 438)…. the luxury of not being confronted with messy problems that contain substantial uncertainty and a tangled web of causes means that chemistry does not teach some rules that are relevant to everyday life

When Felix came to this crossroads, the orthopedic shoe to drop wasn’t his. It was Bella’s. Year by year, I witnessed the progression in her difficulties. Felix remained in astonishingly good health right into his nineties. He had no medical crises and maintained his weekly exercise regimen. He continued to teach chaplaincy students about geriatrics and to serve on Orchard Cove’s health committee. He didn’t even have to stop driving. But Bella was fading. She lost her vision completely. Her hearing became poor. Her memory became markedly impaired. When we had dinner, she had to be reminded more than once that I was sitting across from her. She and Felix felt the sorrows of their losses but also the pleasures of what they still had. Although she might not have been able to remember me or others she didn’t know too well, she enjoyed company and conversation and sought both out. Moreover, she and Felix still had their own, private, decades-long conversation that had never stopped. He found great purpose in caring for her, and she, likewise, found great meaning in being there for him. The physical presence of each other gave them comfort. He dressed her, bathed her, helped feed her. When they walked, they held hands. At night, they lay in bed in each other’s arms, awake and nestling for a while, before finally drifting off to sleep. Those moments, Felix said, remained among their most cherished. He felt they knew each other, and loved each other, more than at any time in their nearly seventy years together.

upon entering the school of medicine in Rome. He was the only student whose father had once been a slave, a fact that had less impact in Rome, where he had still had unlimited

But in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with Ben Richards, an undergraduate student of medicine at Cambridge who was nearly forty years younger than him; this relationship brought him great joy and continued until his death.

Can we treat animal behavior with the same medicines, therapies, and approaches we use on humans? To me, the answer is an obvious yes. You could effectively teach medical students brain anatomy using the brains of dogs. Transferring what you learned about dog brains to knowledge of human brain anatomy would be a breeze.

Education Children in Italy must go to school from age six until age fourteen. Primary school goes through age eleven, when children move to lower secondary school (like middle school in North America). About 80 percent of children continue their education through high school or go to a technical institute. Students who go to college usually attend one in their own city and live at home. Few universities have housing for students. University education in Italy began in ancient times. A school of medicine was founded in Salerno in the ninth century. The University of Bologna, founded in the eleventh century, is probably the oldest full university in Europe. It has about one hundred thousand students. The University of Rome was founded by the Catholic Church in about 1300 and remained primarily a religious institution for hundreds of years. When Rome became part of modern Italy, the university became a state university. Often called La Sapienza, meaning “Knowledge,” it is Europe’s largest university, with nearly 150,000 students.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Pharmacy The Institute is approved by AICTE & Pharmacy Council of India and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. Courses Offered: Bachelor in Pharmacy A Bachelor of Pharmacy (Abbreviated B Pharma) is a graduate education degree in the field of pharmacy. The degree is the basic condition for practicing in many countries as a pharmacist and it is about developing necessary skills for counseling patients about understanding and using the properties of medicines. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) is an undergraduate degree course in the field of Pharmacy education. The students those are interested in the medical field (except to become a doctor) can choose this course after the completion of class 12th. After the completion of this degree, the students can practice as a Pharmacist. Pharmacists can work in a range of industries related to the prescription, manufacture & provision of medicines. The duration of this course is 4 years. The B.Pharm is one of the popular job oriented course among the science students after class 12th. In this course the students study about the drugs and medicines, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry etc. This course provides a large no. of job opportunities in both the public and private sector. There are various career options available for the science students after the completion of B.Pharm degree. The students can go for higher studies in the Pharmacy i.e. Master of Pharmacy (M.Pharm). This field is one of the evergreen fields in the medical sector, with the increasing demand of Pharma professional every year. B.Pharm programme covers the syllabus including biochemical science & health care. The Pharmacy Courses are approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) & Pharmacy Council of India (PCI). B.Pharma – Bachelor in Pharmacy Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility Passed 10+2 examination with Physics and Chemistry as compulsory subjects along with any one of the Mathematics/ Biotechnology/ Biology. Obtained at least 47% marks in the above subjects taken together. Lateral Entry to Second Year: Candidate must have passed Diploma in Pharmacy course of a minimum duration of 2 years or more from Haryana Board of Technical Education or its equivalent with at least 50% marks in aggregate of all semesters/ years.

AS A KID GROWING UP IN A RURAL PENNSYLVANIA COAL COUNTRY in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill McGowan never dreamed of a career as a businessman, unaware that such a profession even existed. The son of a railroad engineer and a schoolteacher, McGowan got his first glimpse of the wider world during a three-year stint in the U.S. Army in postwar Europe, after which he returned home to complete an undergraduate degree in chemistry at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. McGowan excelled at chemistry, thanks to his talent for comprehending the rules of complex systems, but found little joy in the subject. His plans for a career in medicine left him similarly lukewarm. One King’s College professor surmised the gregarious, hyper-analytical student’s true calling and suggested he apply for a seat in Harvard Business School’s class of 1954.

To many critics, the main problem with medical ghostwriting is that academic physicians get credit for articles that they didn't actually write. the status of any academic for articles that they didn't actually write. The status of any academic depends heavily on his or her scholarship, and in academic medicine, the most important measure of scholarship is the sheer quantity of articles produced. The more papers a physician authors, the higher he or she elevates in the academic hierarchy. And if an academic physician is not actually doing the work behind the papers but is simply signing articles written by agency-employed medical writers, that physician's taking credit for the paper seems scandalous, like a student who buys paper on the Internet.

found you on the CRISP website. I was looking for someone at UCSF with an R01 doing research in kidney disease,” I said. CRISP, now called the NIH RePORTER, was the National Institutes of Health’s searchable database of all federally funded biomedical research projects. I knew that the NIH’s R01 grant mechanism, which was awarded to researchers who no longer needed a research mentor, allowed the researcher to apply for smaller research grants to support someone from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine—Blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans, individuals with a physical or mental disability, or those who grew up in poverty—at every level of education, from a high school student to a college student, a medical student, resident, or fellow.

Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes An in-depth discussion of adaptogens with detailed monographs for many adaptogenic, nervine, and nootropic herbs. Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism: Elite Herbs and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging, and Chronic Disease by Donald R. Yance A scientifically based herbal and nutritional program to master stress, improve energy, prevent degenerative disease, and age gracefully. Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal by Rosalee de la Forêt This book offers an introduction to herbal energetics for the beginner, plus a host of delicious and simple recipes for incorporating medicinal plants into meals. Rosalee shares short chapters on a range of herbs, highlighting scientific research on each plant. The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry by Ann Armbrecht Forbes In a world awash with herbal books, this is a much-needed reference, central to the future of plant medicine itself. Ann weaves a complex tapestry through the story threads of the herbal industry: growers, gatherers, importers, herbalists, and change-making business owners and non-profits. As interest in botanical medicine surges and the world’s population grows, medicinal plant sustainability is paramount. A must-read for any herbalist. The Complete Herbal Tutor: The Ideal Companion for Study and Practice by Anne McIntyre Provides extensive herbal profiles and materia medica; offers remedy suggestions by condition and organ system. This is a great reference guide for the beginner to intermediate student. Foundational Herbcraft by jim mcdonald jim mcdonald has a gift for explaining energetics in a down-to-earth and engaging way, and this 200-page PDF is a compilation of his writings on the topic. jim’s categorization of herbal actions into several groups (foundational actions, primary actions, and secondary actions) adds clarity and depth to the discussion. Access the printable PDF and learn more about jim’s work here. The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life by Robin Rose Bennett A beautiful tour of some of our most healing herbs, written in lovely prose. Full of anecdotes, recipes, and simple rituals for connecting with plants. Herbal Healing for Women: Simple Home Remedies for All Ages by Rosemary Gladstar Thorough and engaging materia medica. This was the only book Juliet brought with her on a three-month trip to Central America and she never tired of its pages. Information is very accessible with a lot of recipes and formulas. Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family by Rosemary Gladstar Great beginner reference and recipe treasury written by the herbal fairy godmother herself. The Modern Herbal by Maude Grieve This classic text was first published in 1931 and contains medicinal, culinary, cosmetic, and economic properties, plus cultivation and folklore of herbs. Available for free online.

97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics, and the strategy requires that the nation pay geriatric specialists to teach rather than to provide patient care.

Celebrities Ain't Health Experts (The Sonnet) Celebrities and influencers are not health experts, Stop taking medical advice from halfwits of wellness. Stop being a two-bit doctor from ten minutes of googling, For Google is not a substitute for doctors and nurses. Compared to that of a trained and experienced doctor, Even as a neurobiologist my diagnosis skills are insignifant. Then why can't you accept that when it comes to medicine, Your opinion is worth no more than a counterfeit coin. One goes through years of training and many sleepless nights, Then they earn the right to wear the white coat of service. And yet upon spending an hour surfing on the internet, You put on the personality of a grey-haired neurologist! Lack of expertise is by no means the same as lack of dignity. But denial of expertise indicates a definite lack of senility.

Healthcare means aid first, rules later.

To control disease is called treatment, To be aware of health is called wellness.

and then back toward science when he was young, to the happenstance procedural modifications that allowed him, as a student, to detect what others had missed. In many ways, his path echoed the unpredictable journey that cells take as they find their own way in the cellular society, following their internal compasses at the same time that they respond to outside influences. For as we have already seen, embryonic development is the archetypal example of nature and nurture working in synergy.

Dr. William J. Mayo, one of the founders of Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, remarked: “One meets with many men who have been fine students, and have stood high in their classes, who have great knowledge of medicine but very little wisdom in application. They have mastered the science, and have failed in the understanding of the human being.

Jacob the trickster gets his due. After pulling off the ruse, he has to run for his life and spends 20 years in exile with his uncle. Uncle Laban then gives Jacob a dose of his own medicine by planting an unwanted sister in his wedding bed and by repeatedly changing his wages as head shepherd.

I’ve been told again and again, at school after school, that career service offices have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of law, medicine, finance, and consulting. At the recruitment fairs, the last two dominate the field. And some schools go even further. Stanford offers companies special access to its students for a fee of ten thousand dollars—and it is hard to believe that Stanford is the only one. Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn’t get more cynical than that. But though the process isn’t often that direct, that’s basically the way the system works. As a friend of mine, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. David Foster Wallace (Amherst ’85), has a character put it like this: The college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors.

Most schools, Montessori observed, immobilized students “like butterflies mounted on pins” and attempted to motivate them with prizes and punishments instead of their own interests. In the early 1900s, Montessori left medicine to begin forging her educational philosophy.

In 1966, Gregg Hill took the world’s laziest summer job. First he was poked and prodded and had his fitness assessed by every technique then known to medicine. Then, for 20 days, he and four other student volunteers became the ultimate couch potatoes, confined to bed—not even allowed to walk to the toilet. The goal was to investigate how astronauts would respond to space flight, but when Hill and his fellows finally staggered to their feet, their drastic deterioration helped spark a revolution in medical care here on Earth. As Rick A. Lovett explains, before the experiment took place, bed rest was recommended for people with weak hearts. Afterward, doctors knew that it made them worse.

Usually it takes 4 to 6 years to become a doctor, and another 5 to 10 years to become a specialist. Trying to remember what the world looked like 4 or 6 years ago I recall no widespread use of smartphones, tablets, Google Glass, social media, or artificial intelligence. That is how much the world can change in a few years’ time. The rate of change is even faster now. Current curriculum does not prepare students for these even though new applications and technologies are becoming a crucial part of the medical profession. It is time to change and actually re–think the basics of what we call medical education.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

Which is where the next ambitious ALG project comes in: African Leadership Unleashed, or ALU. Led by Fred Swaniker, ALU is a plan to establish a network of 25 universities across the continent by the end of the decade—Africa’s Ivy League—each of which will have 10,000 students. The first ALU has already opened in Mauritius. The idea is to apply the exact same boutique model of the African Leadership Academy to tertiary education. Once the 25 colleges are built and running, it will mean that every four years 250,000 young Africans trained in business, government, ethics, social policy, medicine and the arts will be entering the workforce. Among them will be the new generation of Africa’s leaders. Says Swaniker, “Hundreds of thousands of university graduates on the continent today are not equipped with the skills to lead change. About 45 percent of university graduates in Africa today are unemployed. This is a tragedy. I want to change this by applying ALA’s model in a tertiary space to provide the critical skills and leadership experience necessary for success.” Swaniker announced the project in a powerful talk at TEDGlobal 2014 in Rio de Janeiro titled “The Leaders Who Ruined Africa, and the Generation Who Can Fix It.” The talk has been downloaded over 1 million times and is a powerful and inspiring manifesto for this, the African Century.

The close-up, reassuring, warm touch of the physician, the comfort and concern, the long, leisurely discussions … are disappearing from the practice of medicine, and this may turn out to be too great a loss. … If I were a medical student or an intern, just getting ready to begin, I would be more worried about this aspect of my future than anything else. I would be apprehensive that my real job, caring for sick people, might soon be taken away, leaving me with the quite different occupation of looking after machines. I would be trying to figure out ways to keep this from happening. —Lewis Thomas, M.D. The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher

there is a new phenomenon known as “flipping,” whereby students can listen to lectures at home or on the go, but come to class for an interactive, non-lecture experience.

was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student.

Clifford” is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays. Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s’ issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind, I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me. Unfortunately, when finals came around, my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said, “No problem, come to my lab.” “When shall we schedule this?” She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided that there was so little left I might as well swallow it all. At

A doctor's mission should not be to prevent death, but more importantly it should be to improve the quality of life.