On bad days, I think I’d like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, ‘Yeah, right, I’m going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.’ No. No.
As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don’t know what they’re saying.
My 94-year-old grandmother has always been so inspiring to me. She is kind, smart, brave, and independent. After graduating number one in her medical school class at a time when it was extremely rare for women to attend medical school, she worked with the World Health Organization in North Africa to eradicate tuberculosis.
As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.
The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.
Whether it’s by helping us search for health-related information, connecting us with doctors through online portals, or enabling us to store and retrieve our medical records online, the Internet is starting to show the promise it has to transform the way people interact with and improve their own health and wellness.
Harvard Medical School, the University of South Florida and the American Psychiatric Association have all conducted studies showing that the earlier one begins gambling, the more likely it is he or she will become an addicted, problem gambler.
I’m involved in everything from a nutraceutical company to a pharmaceutical company to a medical device company. My whole world revolves around health, and I feel it’s my responsibility, in a way, and I say it this way, and I don’t take this lightly.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
I remembered that my grandfather had spent his teenage years in Shanghai and that he went back after he finished medical school to work there in a hospital. So I went back into my family archives and was able to find out his exact address; it was a street that was in the French Concession.
When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses’ station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn’t give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.
When I hear my friend John Boehner say that we have the best health care in the world, I don’t dispute it for a moment. If I were sick, this is the country I want to be in, with these doctors, these hospitals, and these medical professionals.
I’m involved with Kid One Transport and Studio by the Tracks in Alabama. Kid One literally transports kids to better health by giving them transportation they may need to get medical care. Studio by the Tracks is an art outlet for mentally challenged children.
We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.
There are many plant medicines that are available to us that have a lot of stigma around them that I hope, in the future, our medical community can look at, because I would absolutely go to those alternatives first before I went back to Western medicine.
We know that the way to decrease unplanned pregnancies and abortions is to make birth control and family planning services accessible and affordable, not micromanage the type of medical information and reproductive health counseling that women around the world receive.
I do hope to be an adult actor. But if it doesn’t work out, I’ve been thinking about doing something in the medical therapy field, chiropractics or something like that. I’ve always been into the idea of helping people medically, but I can’t stand blood or surgery. That freaks me out. So this would be a bloodless way to help people.
A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.
My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don’t remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.
Medical researchers don’t know much about head lice because they don’t much care. The reason that they don’t much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools.
Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn’t have them anywhere else.
If I’m pushed, I’d also have to admit I don’t like people with allergies. They just annoy me. There seems to be something far too self-centred about it. ‘No thanks, I’m allergic.’ Why not just say ‘No thanks’? I wasn’t asking for your medical history, I was just passing around the nuts. Trying to be friendly, that’s all.
Thinking ahead, in 2013, the Japanese government, together with pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established a fund for promoting research and development of medical products for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The importance of planning for disease outbreaks was made clear with the Ebola virus.
My sister told me: ‘You need to have a baby so that you’ve got someone to look after you when you’re old.’ And I was like: ‘Hang on – I thought that’s what the NHS was for? Unless the NHS is that screwed by the time I’m old, you’ve literally had to give birth to your own medical professional.’
