1. Medicine is 95% common sense – ie good judgment.
2. A practitioner of medicine is paid to listen to people complain.
3. Forty Years of listening to people complain may wear out the stoutest will.
4. 95% of complaints are forever mysterious.
5. The modern medical center is organized solely for the convenience of its administrators.
6. The less we know about a disease the more its management requires an expert.
7. Psychiatry and oncology are the most important specialties – see 6.
8. Never believe anyone (especially me) who tells you he knows how to lower the cost of medicine.
9. Medical care always costs more, no matter what you do to it.
10. The practice of medicine mandates that important decisions be made on the basis of inadequate information.
11. Every surgeon I’ve ever met knows more than I do about acid-base and fluid and electrolyte metabolism.
12. A modern hospital obeys one principle only – keep the beds full. That the patients of a doctor or team be dispersed to the nether regions of the hospital such that more time is spent in transit than at the bedside is irrelevant to the need to keep the assembly line running. Get ’em in then get ’em out with as little time in between as possible.
13 No not for profit hospital voluntarily forgoes making one.
14. A hospital’s main purpose is have as many discharges as possible.
15. Aging consist of those parts that should be soft turning hard while those that should be hard become soft.
16. People who lack health insurance have poorer medical outcomes than those who have insurance. It does not necessarily follow that insuring the uninsured will improve medical outcomes.
17. The goal of medical research is immortality and eternal youth.
18. Meta-analysis is to analysis as metaphysics is to physics – anonymous.
More to come