Medical crisis

“ Is it not obvious that there should be a staff of medical officers and orderlies, detached altogether from any association with the treatment of disease, who should devote themselves entirely to the problem of prevention? ”

“ Today, approximately forty million Americans are afflicted with diabetes, heart conditions, epilepsy, allergies and other medical conditions that are difficult to detect or identify in an emergency. This year, many of these people will become involved in emergency situations and, because of delays in diagnosing and treating their hidden medical problems, may suffer additional injury or even die. ”

“ The medical profession has repeatedly pointed out that there are, on an average, six hundred thousand lives lost every year in the United States from preventable disease and accidents. Six hundred thousand lives which medical science has at hand the remedy to save, but which the medical profession sacrificed because of inadequate legislation. Few people can comprehend just what six hundred thousand lives mean. ”

“ As for reporting, you can’t combat a disease until you know where it is established and whither it is spreading. So, I say, any health officer who succeeds in spurring up the medical profession, and in dragging the Great White Plague out of its lurking-places into the light of day ought to have a medal.”
“What about the other diseases? Is the same true of them?”
“Not to the same extent. No man can tell when or why the epidemic diseases—scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, and diphtheria—come and go. By the way, what about your diphtheria death rate here?” ”

“ Disease, which is quite as natural a process as health, is not allowed to go on as nature would; the internal organs whose morbid action alone can cause death, are made the arena for all sorts of conflicting and inflicting medical stimulants; and between the action which these excite, and that which originally existed, their vitality fails, their efforts towards restoration flag, and their functions are at last extinguished.”
Dr. Rush says:—
“We have multiplied diseases—we have done more, we have increased their mortality.” ”

“ Avoid measuring your services to your patients by scruples, drachms, and ounces. It is an illiberal mode of charging. On the contrary, let the number and time of your visits, the nature of your patient's disease, and his rank in his family or society, determine the figures in your accounts. It is certainly just to charge more for curing an apoplexy, than an intermitting fever. It is equally just, to demand more for risking your life by visiting a patient in a contagious fever, than for curing a pleurisy. You have likewise a right to be paid for your anxiety. ”

“ Epidemics of terrific proportions sweep their recurring millions into the arms of death; diseases of stupendous mortality, such as tuberculosis, cancer, syphilis, diabetes, and the extensive array of so-called contagious diseases of children, are continually increasing, in spite of doctors, hospitals, sanatoria, hydros, hygienics, asylums, nostrums and serums, and continue to afflict humanity, taking their ghastly toll in daily thousands, despite the vaunted but theoretical advancement of Medical Science. ”

“ Any doctor, institution or medical concern which promises to cure disease, either in a public advertisement or in a circular or letter is, in its own type, branded "quack," and the man who wastes his money and his health on such is the Foolkiller's ablest assistant.
⁠If there is one disease more than another where quackery means death to the patient, it is tuberculosis. For, taken early, consumption may be cured, not by medicine, indeed, but by regulated diet, open air, and sunlight. ”

“ What has to be complained of, however, is that constant attempts are made to introduce cases which are so far from being convalescent, that they are still suffering from disease, and require constant medical or surgical treatment. ”

“ A radical cure, however, cannot be accomplished except by surgical means, for which we have the knife, ligature, caustic, stimulating injections, etc., which may be varied to suit the emergency, but which should never be employed except by a competent surgeon. Constitutional conditions materially influence the cure, no matter what procedure is adopted; the greater the constitutional derangement and the poorer the general health, the longer is the cure delayed. The great secret of our success in treating this disease consists in applying appropriate constitutional treatment at the same time. ”

“ There is no quarrel here between men, but there is deadly incompatibility and exterminating warfare between doctrines. Coincidences meaning nothing, though a man have a monopoly of the disease for weeks or months; or cause and effect, the cause being in some way connected with the person; this is the question. If I am wrong, let me be put down by such a rebuke as no rash declaimer has received since there has been a public opinion in the medical profession of America ”

“ Of late, many persons have begun to examine for themselves questions which they had been wont to leave entirely to their medical adviser.
The sanitary movement has shown that more people die every year from avoidable causes than would satisfy the yawning gulf of a severe epidemic, or the most destructive battle. ”

“ These high death rates can be attributed only to one or more of the following causes:―Defective stamina in the population, delay in applying for medical relief, bad and insufficient hospital accommodation, or defective medical treatment and management of the sick. ”

“ An attempt to make chronic cases of disease subservient to any mercenary purpose, is an entire perversion of the liberal dictates of science; and often renders the most assiduous exertions unavailing. Where there is scarcely sufficient disease to impose bodily restriction, it cannot be expected that protracted courses of medicine can be endured, unless it be administered in the most simple and unobjectionable form. Nevertheless, it is a duty to subdue chronic diseases; and often it can only be done by a persevering management of diet, aided by medicine. ”

“ For its sins of omission, as for its sins of commission, the medical profession shares responsibility with laymen. For years leading educators, business men, hospital directors, public officials, have known that communicable diseases could be stamped out. ”

“ The advantages which may arise from this system will appear in a still more striking point of view, when we reflect that those cases which without proper care in the early stages of the disease ultimately become the worst and the most dangerous, are precisely those which are fatally neglected, in the first instance, and which are scarcely ever placed under any medical treatment or moral discipline until the evil is past all remedy. Cases of suspension and cases of gradual decay of mind, as well as cases of Hypochondria, are of this description. ”

“ President, if this powerfully organized and dominating sect of medicine, which now has such a dangerous [Pg 67] power in our body politic, will cast out the blinding “beams” of compulsory medicine, inflicted disease and medical falsification out of its mental eyes it may then be able to see clearly to cast out the relatively harmless medical “motes” out of the eyes of our fellow men. ”

“ While it is true that to the public mind there is a more lurid and spectacular menace in such diseases as small-pox, yellow fever and plague, medical men and public health workers are beginning to realize that, with the warfare against such maladies well or ganized, it is now time to give attention to the heavy loss from lowered physical efficiency and chronic, preventable disease, a loss exceeding in magnitude that sustained from the more widely feared communicable diseases. ”

“ We must understand structure and function, and the changes produced in each by disorder and disease. There is no short cut, nor “royal road,” to the attainment of medical knowledge. The path which we have to pursue is long, difficult, and unsafe. In our progress, we must frequently take up our abode with death and corruption; we must adopt loathsome diseases for our familiar associates, or we shall never be thoroughly acquainted with their nature and dispositions; we must risk, nay even injure, our own health in order to be able to preserve or restore that of others. ”

“ All progress in civilization is attended with injury to some individuals. Trained nurses have deprived some unskilled labour of employment; hospitals have injured the business of some physicians; pure-water supplies, good sewers, food inspection, vaccination,—in short, all effective measures in public hygiene,—interfere with the trade side of medical practice ”

“ With the help of our Nation's leading medical professionals and appropriate preventative measures, we hope for a future where heart disease no longer claims the lives of so many American men and women. ”

“ The doctor who never changes his diagnosis is the doctor who never makes one, or who makes it so elastic that it means nothing. So social workers should never fear to add to, to subtract from or to modify their social diagnoses.
The best medical diagnoses—those made after [Pg 111] death—often contain fifteen or twenty items. Before death in a recent case we found pneumonia. After death we found in addition: meningitis, heart-valve disease, kidney trouble, gall-stones, healed tuberculosis, and ten minor troubles in various parts of the body. ”

“ Parents should not put off the employment of a competent specialist in this terrible, distressing, and fatal disease. As treated by general practitioners, it very often proves fatal; or, after causing intense suffering for a series of years, if the active condition of the disease subsides, the patient is left with a ruined and broken constitution, a result which more prompt and earlier relief would have prevented. ”

“ Without a single exception, I found them impressed with a sense of the necessity of doing something, and with a conviction that they might materially help the medical profession in carrying out any plan of operation proposed by authority. The necessity of some such general plan is greater now than it was then, on account of the continual prevalence in their severest forms of our own epidemics, and of the nearer approach of cholera. ”

“ Hence what would in a fairly robust state of health have been only a temporary conflict with a mild attack of inflammation, developed into a severe form, overwhelming the vital force with great rapidity and rendering all medical aid powerless. ”

“ By pointing out the real causes, warning will be given for their avoidance, and indications extended for the application of more certain remedies. Medical men who see only a few patients of the same occupation at distant intervals; who see them in their own dispensaries or in the hospitals, and who have no opportunities of observing such patients under the varied circumstances in which the disease may have been contracted, are left to mere guesses as to its cause. ”

“ But the fact that medical shortcomings, real or supposed, manifested themselves in the sensitive area of human suffering and death made all the more glaring every instance of ineptitude, inadequacy, inefficiency, or just plain indifference. ”

“ He believed one of the greatest political economists of the day, whom he saw present, would bear him out that political economy and philanthropy went hand in hand when they were employed in energetic and persistent endeavours to arrest disease in its earliest stages. No one could go much about our general hospitals without seeing how much of the misery and distress of this world were caused by disease. ”

“ Because when you see what the health care crisis is doing to our families, to our economy, to our country, you realize that caution is what's costly. Inaction is what's risky. Doing nothing is what's impossible when it comes to health care in America. ”

“ Now if there was a law made to punish any person who should through any medical journal communicate to the people any new disease and its symptoms, it would put a stop to a great deal of sickness. Seven cases out of ten throughout the whole community of old chronic cases are the effects of false impressions produced by medical men, giving to the people the idea they have spinal disease, or heart or kidney or liver disease, or forty others that I could name, to say nothing of the number of nervous diseases. ”

“ I am sorry to add, in this place, that the number of patients in the HOSPITAL, and incurables in the ALMSHOUSE of this city, show that we are treading in the enervated steps of our fellow subjects in Britain. Our bills of mortality likewise show the encroachments of British diseases upon us. The NERVOUS FEVER has become so familiar to us, that we look upon it as a natural disease. ”

“ Political events now gave a new direction to thought, and the Franco-Prussian War filled the hospitals of both nations with wounded in which there was opened a grand field for the practical study of purulent infection in all its various forms. Humanity now demanded the best efforts of the medical profession. ”

“ If these complete services were provided, the medical treatment now provided largely at the expense of the community could be made a means for advancing the public health. This it can not at present claim to be. For nothing is more certain than that the prompt and adequate treatment of disease curtails its duration, diminishes its severity, and prevents its spread to others. ”

“ The resulting physical evils may be slow in revealing themselves, because they only gradually undermine the constitution. They do not herald themselves in the alarming manner of a fever or a convulsion, but they are not to be less dreaded from their masked approach. The chief forms of physical deterioration are nervous exhaustion, impaired power of resistance to epidemics or other injurious influences, and the development of those germs of disease, or tendencies to some particular form of disease, which exist in the majority of constitutions. ”