“The health system” will not pay the price for highly skilled and educated persons to dispense drugs, but the system will pay for the appropriate selection and use of these drugs, and it is that responsibility upon which the future of this profession must be built and built quickly. Dallas, March 21, 1993
-Robert Johnson
The young physician starts life with twenty drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for twenty diseases.
-William Osler
Polypharmacy is a prosthesis for the physician’s incompetence. The less he knows, the more prescriptions he writes.
-Zeljko Poljak
He who lives medically, lives miserably.
-Wise Old Proverb
We are overwhelmed as it is, with an infinite abundance of vaunted medicaments, and here they add another one.
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Thomas Sydeham (1624-1689)
The disgrace of medicine has been that colossal system of self-deception, in obedience to which mines have been emptied of their cankering minerals, the vegetable kingdom robbed of all its noxious growths, the entrails of animals taxed for their impurities, the poison-bags of reptiles drained of their venom, and all the inconceivable abominations thus obtained thrust down the throats of human beings suffering from some fault of organization, nourishment, or vital stimulation.
Oliver Wendel Holmes
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries
-William Osler
The human’s “desire to take medicine” carries, however, a price tag. Nature’s maladies are succeeded by iatrogenic hazards. Arising out of a restorative instinct, polypharmacy becomes itself an affliction
Kurt Kroenke 1985
Some drugs have been appropriately called “wonder drugs” inasmuch as one wonders what they will do next
-Samuel Stumpf
All substances are poisonous, there is none which is not a poison; the right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy
-Paracelsus 1567
