Health & Wellness / Lifestyle

Interesting Quotes

Editorial Staff

These Hospital Germs "Can Survive in Detergent"

"You can go into a hospital and you have a four in hundred chance of getting an infection you've never had before. In some hospitals, the odds are one in 10. What you will get in that hospital will be much worse than what you would have been contaminated with at home. They are the most tenacious organisms you can imagine. They can survive in detergent. They can actually live on a bar of soap. These are organisms that are part of our endgame."

Dr. Marc Lappe, author of Germs That Won't Die (1981). Quoted in The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.

 



A Physician Is Not a Commodities Broker

"All the symptoms of protest confirm the same diagnosis: a health-care industry sickened with the virus of `medical-loss ratio' and unlikely to recover until cured of its addiction to the profit motive. A physician is not by nature a commodities broker, a clinic is not a meat-packing plant, and unless the health-care industry quits caring for money instead of people, its chronic pathology almost certainly will be referred to the consulting rooms of government. Not that the politicians will want to take the case, but let enough people make strong enough complaint, and the therapeutics committees in the country's legislatures might be forced to write a new and not so mean-spirited set of guidelines."

Ronald Glasser, MD
Harper's Magazine, March 1998

June 1998
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