Words matter. These are the best Marcia Angell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician’s role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient’s wishes.
Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.
I do think that we are an overmedicated society.
It’s not just the right-wing crazies who oppose health reform. In addition, there are many sane Americans who worry about committing a trillion dollars to it.
The pharmaceutical industry isn’t the only place where there’s waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.
Japan has very long hospital stays. Ah, it’s almost a rest cure. People in Japan who are hospitalized might lie around the hospital for a week or two just to take a rest.
The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.
Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.
Health care is a need; it’s not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you’re very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you’re not sick, you shouldn’t have a lot of it.
There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease. There’s a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful.
Brand-name drugs have no competition, since the government grants them very long, exclusive marketing rights.
In economic terms, health care is a highly successful industry – profitable, growing, and virtually recession-proof – but it’s a massive burden on the rest of the economy.
Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.
The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.
For all of life’s discontents, according to the pharmaceutical industry, there is a drug and you should take it. Then for the side effects of that drug, then there’s another drug, and so on. So we’re all taking more drugs, and more expensive drugs.
