The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.
A lot of medical problems are solved if doctors are nice to patients. If you can make them think positive, you may not need medication.
Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.
Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.
Most of the people who make decisions about global health are in the U.S. and Western Europe. There, the mental health care system is dominated by highly trained, expensive professionals in big hospitals, who often see patients over long periods of time. This simply can't be done in rural Africa or India. Who the hell can afford that kind of care?
If health and medical experts told me I should wear a mask while I was briefing, I would do it.
America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world.
Ventilators can be reused but hospitals need a sufficient supply to treat critically ill patients while still allowing enough time for each ventilator to be refurbished between patients.
What's happened [in UK] is a private medical practice has started up, people who can afford it are going to into medical institutions, hospitals and so forth, that are not part of the National Health Service, they've opted out.
Even top caliber hospitals cannot escape medical mistakes that sometimes result in irreparable damage to patients
Even top caliber hospitals cannot escape medical mistakes that sometimes result in irreparable damage to patients.
A central notion in the Affordable Care Act was we had an inefficient system with a lot of waste that didn't also deliver the kind of quality that was needed that often put health care providers in a box where they wanted to do better for their patients, but financial incentives were skewed the other way... We don't need to reinvent the wheel; you're already figuring out what works to reduce infections in hospitals or help patients with complicated needs.
Most drugs sold in the U.S. are produced outside of the country, and if we can ensure supply-chain safety for these drugs, introducing more of them to the market quicker could mean major differences in the price of drugs, quality of life for patients, and for some Americans the difference between life and death.
The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called 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.
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
I want to relax for a while, maybe go back to my medical practice. I got a lot of old patients waiting for me.