Interesting Quotes from Medical Professionals on Pharmaceutical Drugs

1. “The cause of most disease is in the poisonous drugs physicians superstitiously give in order to effect a cure.” 

Charles E. Page, M.D. practices emergency medicine in Durango, Colorado.

 

2. “Medicines are of subordinate importance because of their very nature, they can only work symptomatically.” 

Hans Kusche, M.D.

 

3. “The only real difference between medicine and poison is the dose....and intent.”           

Oscar G. Hernandez, MD, Miami, FL, Critical Care Medicine, Pulmonology, Internal Medicine.

 

4. “Drug medications consists in employing, as remedies for disease, those things which produce disease in well persons. Its material medica is simply a lot of drugs or chemicals or dye-stuffs in a word “poisons!”. All are incompatible with vital matter; all produce disease when brought in contact in any manner with the living; all are poisons.”

R.T. Trall, M.D., in a two and one half hour lecture to members of congress and the medical profession, delivered at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.

 

5. “Every drug increases and complicates the patient’s condition.” 

Robert Henderson, M.D., Orthopedic Surgeon in Dallas

 

6. “Drugs never cure disease. They merely hush the voice of nature's protest, and pull down the danger signals she erects along the pathway of transgression. Any poison taken into the system has to be reckoned with later on even though it palliates present symptoms. Pain may disappear, but the patient is left in a worse condition, though unconscious of it at the time.” 

Daniel H. Kress, M.D.

 

7. "The greatest part of all chronic disease is created by the suppression of acute disease by drug poisoning."                                                                     

Henry Lindlahr, M.D., the founder of "Scientific Naturopathy" in the United States.

 

8. “Every educated physician knows that most diseases are not appreciably helped by medicine.” 

Richard C. Cabot, M.D. (Mass. Gen. Hospital)

 

9. “Medicine is only palliative, for in back of disease lies the cause, and this cause no drug can reach.”

Wier Mitchel, M.D., Neurologist

 

10. “The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.” 

William Osler, M.D., Late Regius Professor of Medicine, Oxford University.

 

11. “Medical practice has neither philosophy nor common sense to recommend it. In sickness the body is already loaded with impurities. By taking drugs (medicines) more impurities are added, thereby the case is further embarrassed and harder to cure.”

Elmer Lee, M.D., Past Vice President, Academy of Medicine.

 

12. “Our figures show approximately four and one half million hospital admissions annually due to the adverse reactions to drugs. Further, the average hospital patient has as much as thirty percent chance, depending how long he is in, of doubling his stay due to adverse drug reactions.” 

Milton Silverman, M.D. (Professor of Pharmacology, University of California)

 

13. “Why would a patient swallow a poison because he is ill, or take that which would make a well man sick.”

L.F. Kebler, M.D., Chief, Division of Drugs, U. S. Department of Agriculture WASHINGTON, D. C.

 

14. “What hope is there for medical science to ever become a true science when the entire structure of medical knowledge is built around the idea that there is an entity called disease which can be expelled when the right drug is found?” 

John H. Tilden, M.D., Health Research, Mokelumne Hill. California.

 

15. “The necessity of teaching mankind not to take drugs and medicines, is a duty incumbent upon all who know their uncertainty and injurious effects; and the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned.” 

Charles Armbruster, M. D.

 

16. “We are prone to thinking of drug abuse in terms of the male population and illicit drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. It may surprise you to learn that a greater problem exists with millions of women dependent on legal prescription drugs.” 

Robert Mendelsohn, M.D

 

17. “Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.”

Ivan Illich, in Medical Nemesis (1976)

 

18. “From inability to let well alone; from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old; from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art and cleverness before common sense; from treating patients as cases; and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, Good Lord, deliver us”.

Sir Robert Hutchison, 20th century physician, British Medical Journal, 1953; 1: 671.

 

19. “We have to ask ourselves whether Medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.”

Elisabeth KuBler-Ross, July 8 1926 – August 24 2004, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, a pioneer in Near-death studies and the author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying (1969), where she first discussed what is now known as the Kübler-Ross model. She is a 2007 inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees and by July 1982 had taught, in her estimation, 125,000 students in death and dying courses in colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions.                                                                                           

20. “Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born March 6 1927, a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, journalist; considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and is the earliest winner of this prize to be still alive.

 

21.  “From year to year, it is more obvious: the goal of Medicine is not health but the further extension of the health system.”

Gerhard Kocher, Born 1939 in Berne. Swiss health economist and writer of aphorisms.

 

22. “Pharma industry is the art of making billions from milligrams.”

Gerhard Kocher

 

23. “Never ask a surgeon whether you need an operation.”

Gerhard Kocher

 

24.  “Mankind has survived all catastrophes. It will also survive modern Medicine.”

Gerhard Kocher

 

25.  “Many of us will die for science without knowing it.”

Gerhard Kocher

 

Historical Quotes

26. “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.”

Voltare, French Philosopher and Writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694 -1778.

 

27. “The art of medicine consists of amusing the patients while nature cures the disease.” 

Voltare, French Philosopher and Writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694 -1778.

 

28. “I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Prof. of Med. Harvard University, 19th century Physician.

 

29. “The objective of medicine is not the knowledge of the Disease, but the relieve of the suffering due to it”.

Miguel Ángel García, Spanish Medical Doctor.

 

30. “Medicine, the only profession that labours incessantly to destroy the reason for its existence.”

James Bryce, British Politician, Diplomat and Historian, 1838-1922.

 

31. “Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.”

Matthew Prior, 1664-1721, English Poet and Diplomat.

 

32. “The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will educate his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”

Thomas A Edison.

 

33. “The orthodox school has witnessed for centuries that nature itself has never once cured any existing disease with another dissimilar one, however intense. What must we think of this school, which nevertheless has continued to treat chronic diseases allopathically, with medicines and formulas that can only cause a disease condition -God knows which -dissimilar to the one being treated? Even if these physicians have not hitherto observed nature attentively enough, the miserable results of their treatment should have taught them that they were on the wrong road.”

Samuel Hahnemann, April 1755 – July 1843, a German Physician, known for creating an Alternative Form of Medicine called Homeopathy.

 

34. “For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”

Marcel Proust, French Novelist, Critic and Essayist.

 

35. “I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.”

Alexander the Great

 

36. “The Lord hath created Medicines out of the earth: and he that is wise will not abhor them. Was not the water made sweet with wood, that the virtue thereof might be known?”

Bible [Ecclesiasticus 38:4-5]

 

37. “Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.”

Napoleon Bonaparte, 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821, a Military and Political leader of France and Emperor of the French as Napoleon I, whose actions shaped European politics in the early 19th century.

 

38. “Some fell by laudanum, and some by steel, and death in ambush lay in every pill.”

Sir Samuel Garth, English physician and poet.

 

39. “They had me on the operating table all day. They looked into my stomach, my gall bladder, they examined everything inside of me. Know what they decided? I need glasses. ”

Joe E Lewis

 

40. “There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and Medicine.”

Gerald F Lieberman

 

41. “To live by Medicine is to live horribly.”

Carolus Linnaeus, May 1707 – January 1778, a Swedish Botanist, Physician and Zoologist who created the Binomial Nomenclature.

 

42. “God help the patient.”

Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1756 to 1788.

 

43. “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”

Sir William Osler, 12 July 1849 – 29 December 1919 was a Canadian physician. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the first Professor of Medicine and founder of the Medical Service there. (The "Big Four" were William Osler, Professor of Medicine; William Stewart Halsted, Professor of Surgery; Howard A. Kelly, Professor of Gynecology; and William H. Welch, Professor of Pathology).Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has been called the "Father of modern medicine." Osler was a pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker.

 

44. “Poisons and Medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.”

Peter Mere Latham, July 1789 – July 1875, an English Physician and a great Educator.

 

45. “He who lives by medical prescriptions lives miserably.” Proverb