40 Quotes by Marcia Angell

Few things a doctor does are more important than relieving pain. . . pain is soul destroying. No patient should have to endure intense pain unnecessarily. The quality of mercy is essential to the practice of medicine; here, of all places, it should not be strained.

Since 1994, any herbal remedy sold as a dietary supplement -- no matter what their real purpose -- the FDA has no authority over them,

Obamacare is simply incapable of doing what it is supposed to do - provide nearly universal care at an affordable and sustainable cost.

Just look at herbal remedies. It's essentially a throwback. It's saying you go to a plant and you mush it up and you stick it in the jar and you sell it and you eat it and it's going to cure what ails you. And that's the kind of stuff that people believed in the early 19th century.

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.

I think doctors are really suffering now. They're suffering in the sense that they feel torn between serving their patients in the best way they can and dealing with all of requirements of the insurance companies and the HMOs and the hassles and the paper work and the increasing pressures to do less and less for their patients.

Patients may postpone getting needed effective treatment, because they are instead relying on alternative remedies that haven't been tested, ... The second danger is that they may actually be harmful.

Unlike the federal government, most states don't have the option of running a deficit.

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.