Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
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Keep politics out of medical decision making
3 Dec2009
The ACP testified on the "breast cancer screening controversy". These paragraphs make the point beautifully:
Addressing lessons learned from the controversy over the recent breast screening guidelines, Dr. Sweet noted that the public is ill-served when assessments of clinical effectiveness are politicized. For clinicians and patients alike to have confidence in the evidence, physicians need to know that it has been developed through a process that is independent of political pressure.
“ACP is concerned that such politicization, if left unchallenged, could lead to efforts to eliminate the Task Force, cut its funding, or result in politically-driven changes so that future evaluations are influenced by political or stakeholder interests—instead of science,” Dr. Sweet emphasized. “We would be concerned that this would also lead to political interference over other federally-funded entities involved in evidence-based research.”
Amen
Related posts:
- Mammograms and cost containment
- Not all screening helps patients
- Politics and mammograms – I am disgusted and disappointed
- My disappointment in Sebelius
- Intuition versus evidence
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- In: Medical Rants
3 Responses to Keep politics out of medical decision making
Evan Falchuk
December 4th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Dr. Centor,
The trouble is, this cat is well out of the bag.
I saw where the commission members said that they did not consider politics at all in making their recommendations.
But you know for sure that they will, the next time.
It's not a good thing for science, and it's yet another reason why it is so much better if we can keep politicians away from it.
Cheers,
Evan
More Good Reading « See First Blog
December 4th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
[...] Dr. Bob Centor wants to Keep Politics Out of Medical Decision-Making. I agree – but is the cat already out of the [...]
Michael Kirsch, M.D.
December 4th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Evan Falchuk above states that the cat is already out of the bag. It's more like a tiger running wild through the streets. Politics vanquished evidenced-based medicine. How hard will comparative effectiveness research (CER) and health care reform be? Obviously, much harder than we thought. When Sec'y Sebelius pushed back against her own government's USPSTF, we learned that CER really stands for Comparative Effectiveness Retreat. http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com