Western Medicine Quotes

“I am a child of Western medicine.
I am a cynic, a skeptic, which is the attitude underlying so much of Western medicine.
I don't believe in inherent goodness.
I don't believe that nature will never lead you astray.
I believe there are more than one hundred billion cells in the body and if, at any moment, one of them is not becoming cancerous, it's only your good luck, the whimsy of your god that has spared you.
Natural childbirth proudly announces, "All pain has a purpose," which is a wonderful view, an utterly romantic view, straight out of the mind of Shelley or Byron; those thoughts are not mine. I live in a world of random events, unseen collisions, and sudden swerves.

The beauty, for me, lies not in knowing there is an underlying purposeful pattern but in facing, with some sort of grace, the impenetrable vista.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been and experiment in social engineering, putting our fate in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed... we seek a life of worth and purpose, yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End