Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations. To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs. It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. . Karen Hitchcock
Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full...
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Unknown
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
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W.b. Yeats
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
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Simone De Beauvoir
...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
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Terry Pratchett
I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening When I counted my scanty store; For Life is just an employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, Why, you...
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Jessie B. Rittenhouse
More Quotes By Karen Hitchcock
If we are to welcome the elderly into our communities and support them to stay there for as long as possible, if we are to attend to the social needs of our elderly citizens both inside and out of institutions, then we need both government...
When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?" Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part...
No one wants to go into a nursing home. My patients fear it; families often feel terrible guilt when the time comes: it is thought of as an abandonment. Nursing homes are where we place our bad outcomes, our frail, our no-longer-independents. They are places...
Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society...
