Sandeep Jauhar > Quotes

“The only mistake you can make is not asking for help.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

“Success is judged not by the position you reach in life but by the obstacles you have overcome.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“In many ways, the heart does resemble a house. It is divided into multiple chambers, separated by doors. The walls have a characteristic texture. The house is old, designed over many millennia. Hidden from view are the wires and pipes that keep it functioning. And though the house has no intrinsic meaning, it carries meaning because of the meanings we attribute to it.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“For even if the heart is not the seat of the emotions, it is highly responsive to them.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“I witnessed so much death and dying that first year, it was sometimes hard to take. Every death challenged me to clarify my value system. How much should I defer to a patient’s wishes regarding end-of-life care? How hard should I encourage him, as I had James Irey, to make what I thought were the right choices? How to balance a patient’s autonomy with the competing ethical imperatives of beneficence or social responsibility?”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Do you want to live a long, healthy, and prosperous life? Don’t smoke. Exercise. Eat right. But also take good care of your interpersonal relationships and the way you deal with life’s inevitable upsets and traumas. Your mind-set, your coping strategies, how you navigate challenging circumstances, your capacity to transcend distress, your capacity to love – these things, I believe, are also a matter of life and death.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“You can speed up after an accident, but you never make up for lost time.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Perhaps this is the solution to medicine’s midlife crisis, too: doctors focusing on their noble craft, their relationships with patients, the stuff over which we have some control. Ultimately, this may be the best hope for our professional salvation.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Callahan got up and wrote “extend life < prevent suffering” on a white board. Underneath he wrote: “Goals: hasten death (no); prevent suffering (yes).” Turning to me, he said that it was ethically justifiable to start a drug like morphine that could speed up death, as long as preventing suffering was the primary intention and hastening death was an inescapable side effect. This doctrine of “double effect” says that actions in the pursuit of a good end (symptom relief) are morally acceptable even if they result in a negative outcome (death), as long as the negative outcome is unintended and the good outcome is not a direct consequence of the negative one.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection. —Bertrand Russell”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Many professions, including law and teaching, have become constrained by corporate structures, resulting in loss of autonomy, status, and respect.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“we thought it was worthwhile and noble, but from what I have seen in my short career, it is a charade.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Continuous blood flow is antithetical to the way that humans, pulsatile beings, evolved. Though continuous flow can keep us alive, it alters ours physiology in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“Sandeep Jauhar is the bestselling author of three acclaimed books, Intern, Doctored, and Heart: A History, which was named a best book of 2018 by Science Friday, The Mail on Sunday, and the Los Angeles Public Library, and was a PBS NewsHour / New York Times book club pick; it was also a finalist for the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize. A practicing physician, Jauhar writes regularly for the opinion section of The New York Times. His TED Talk on the emotional heart was one of the ten most watched of 2019. To learn more about his work, follow him on Twitter: @sjauhar. You can sign up for email updates here.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's

“Wholly unprepared,… we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —Carl Jung”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Apart from the perverse incentives of our fee-for-service system, a major driver of overconsultation is the uncertainty engendered by the hurried pace of contemporary medicine.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“Traditional" Japanese immigrants had coronary disease rates in line with their homeland counterparts. "Westernised" immigrants had a prevalence that was at least 3 times higher. "Retention of Japanese group relationships is associated with a lower rate of coronary heart disease", the authors concluded. And so, acculturation, they declared, is a major risk factor for coronary disease in immigrant populations.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“Indeed, this crisis was also spurred by the abandonment of professional ideals in the pursuit of profit that made managed care necessary in the first place.”
― Sandeep Jauhar

“Technology cannot change whether you are going to die, only the mode of your demise.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician

“At lunchtime someone would call out, "Anybody want Mexican?" and I would respond, "Count me in!" like I belonged.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

“Satisfaction cannot be stored.”
― Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: A History

“You never really grow up until your parents die....While your parents are alive, there is always someone who thinks of you as a child”
― Sandeep Jauhar, My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's