Bringing together the unique expertise of researchers from both NYU and the Technion will hopefully enable us to overcome some of the most difficult challenges in treating cancer patients.
Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'
I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.
Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'
We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
When medical students focus on helping others, they're able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.
