The world faces enormous human development and environmental challenges, from poverty and disease to food security and climate change.
When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked.
In order to do ‘Amores Perros,’ I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.
Manic depressive is a disease.
I’m still not comfortable recommending that people eat saturated fat with abandon, but it’s clear to me that sugar, flour and oxidized seed oils create inflammatory effects in the body that almost certainly bear most of the responsibility for elevating heart disease risk.
When we harness the ability to turn connections into data and then into knowledge, we can empower citizens, patients, and professionals to prevent disease, avoid or better manage health crises, and even save lives.
By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the ‘real world.’ So I started working for newspapers.
My son John was just under a year old when I collapsed with a life-threatening kidney disease. The shame and guilt resulting from my unplanned pregnancy had continued to fester to the point that my toxic feelings literally poisoned my body.
I live in a fantasy world where I think I’m immune to all disease. I don’t get sick and haven’t had anything major go wrong.
No matter who you are, what you’ve accomplished, what your financial situation is – when you’re dealing with a parent with Alzheimer’s, you yourself feel helpless. The parent can’t work, can’t live alone, and is totally dependent, like a toddler. As the disease unfolds, you don’t know what to expect.
I have never had a dietician and I never will, unless I get a disease.
When I was a child I had something called Perthes’ Disease which meant I was on crutches, so I was bullied at school and all that sort of stuff.
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.
When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I turned 50, it was certainly a shock. But as a journalist, knowing a little bit about a lot of things, I didn’t suffer the misconception that depression was all in my head or a mark of poor character. I knew it was a disease, and, like all diseases, was treatable.
Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.
We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that’s bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon’s one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.
There is no reason why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease, and illiteracy.
I’ve met a ton of new people who have colitis or Crohn’s. Talking to them has been probably the most healing thing: to hear other people’s attitudes on how they deal with their disease and how they stay positive.
I am very thankful that I have lived the life I have lived. I am thankful for my Graves’ disease, and I tell people, if I had my whole life to live over, I would have it, because it has really made me into the person that I am.
Life – and I don’t suppose I’m the first to make this comparison – is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
With this disease it is so easy to throw in the towel, and that is the worst thing we can do.
Any other illness, any other disease that we’re faced with, there’s sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, ‘Oh, they’re crazy,’ to belittle the problem.
We have a disease care system, not a health care system.
We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.
In high school, I had a couple girlfriends who had very extreme eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia. And in college as well. It’s just heartbreaking. As someone going through it, it’s heartbreaking. And as a friend who’s helping a friend going through it, it’s heartbreaking. It’s a real, real disease.
Talking is the disease of age.
Religious work is one of the best ways to keep from facing your reality if you are Christian, if you are using it to calm the pain, because that it what all addictions are, attempts to cover the pain of this spiritual disease.
Unhealthy eating habits cause major health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, and can also lead to food insecurity, disrupted eating patterns, and low self-esteem.
Thinking of disease constantly will intensify it. Feel always ‘I am healthily in body and mind’.
For people who have heart disease, statins are great. But if all you’ve had is high cholesterol, what you’re doing is taking this 1/100 chance of getting a benefit and offsetting it with 1/200 chance of getting diabetes.
The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it’s egotism.
This enzyme, called telomerase, slows the rate at which telomeres degrade, and research indicates that healthy people with longer telomeres have less risk of developing the common illnesses of aging – like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which are three big killers today.
It’s a disease we have that we think that everything is explainable. It’s a merchandising idea because you can sell explanations and cures for everything, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s very hard to understand everything.
In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the United States, and the incidence is growing rapidly. In 2009, the C.D.C. reported thirty-eight thousand cases, three times more than in 1991. Most researchers agree that the true number of infections is five to ten times higher.
Retire? Not on your life. I have no plans to stop singing. What are you going to do when you love music? It’s a terrible disease. You can’t stop. Of course, I’d like to get off the road.
I’m a prime example of the way kidney disease strikes silently.
If we can reach populations in developing countries and help them understand the value of their indigenous diet and lifestyles rather than copying ours, perhaps we can reverse the exponential rise in cardiovascular disease that is plaguing them.
Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.
I am a medical scientist, not a practical physician. I think it’s very upfront. I am a doctor. I have long experience with heart disease.
Over most of history, threats have come from nature – disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We’ve entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.
The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.
Alcoholism is a genetically predisposed disease and it does run in my family. I also think I felt like a misfit. I was in the South, everybody was blonde. I just didn’t feel like I fitted in. It was sort of my way of fitting.
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Violent drama has been a hallmark of every great civilization. It is not the cause of the disease – it is an immunizing factor. People go to the theater to experience emotions like fear and loathing. Violent drama shows us where we come from. It makes us face our hypocrisy.
My wife Kris and I enjoy keeping an active lifestyle, so it’s hard to imagine what it would be like if breathing problems kept me from participating in the activities I love to do. But that’s exactly what happens to many people who develop COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
I don’t like Heather Graham. She did an interview and said, ‘I didn’t want to kiss Corey; I didn’t want to catch his mononucleosis. He had a kissing disease.’
