Clergyman's

Everything looked so good in the computer, and yet what Father had gotten was not Medicine but Health Care-- Medicine without a soul. What do I mean by ""soul""? I mean what Father did not get. Presence. Attention. Judgment. Kindness. Above all, responsibility.
- Victoria Sweet

...I learned a Slow Medicine lesson: how individual medicine was. It wasn't true that one size fits all, that everyone or no one should have that treatment or this pill. Rather, the right answer had to do with style, with who you were, who the patient was.
- Victoria Sweet

We don't need to remake our health-care system or rebuild it from the ground up. We don't need to do very much. It's pretty simple, quite attainable. Just an added perspective and a change of pace.
- Victoria Sweet

Patients are not consumers, but sick, scared, vulnerable. Doctors and nurses are practicing a calling, a vocation, a craft and an art.
- Victoria Sweet

Patients are not consumers, but sick, scared, vulnerable. Doctors and nurses are practicing a calling, a vocation, a craft and an art.
- Victoria Sweet

Patients are not consumers, but sick, scared, vulnerable. Doctors and nurses are practicing a calling, a vocation, a craft and an art.
- Victoria Sweet

Every time a new drug comes out, I read what the side effects are and how many people really get better, and I add in the side effects and the adverse reactions. When you do that, and subtract out the placebo effect, not many new medications make a difference.
- Victoria Sweet

The essence of Medicine is story-- finding the right story, understanding the true story, being unsatisfied with a story that does not make sense. Healthcare, on the other hand, deconstructs story into thousands of tiny pieces-- pages of boxes and check marks for which no one is responsible.
- Victoria Sweet

The way we talk about patient care in our society is almost the opposite of what's actually happening. It's almost like the less we care in any way for the patient the more people talk about the patient, the ""consumer"" of health care. What was actually meant by that saying was that caring meant doing little things for them; it's the little things that establish the relationship between you and the patient, not some abstract ""love for your neighbor."" It's doing something actual and physical for this neighbor.
- Victoria Sweet

I had the time to try things, to stop others . And what impressed me was how efficient it was and how much money I saved by having that extra time. And I will give an example. Most of the patients I met for the first time were very sick for a long time, and most of them, on average were on between 15 and 26 medications. Most of them only needed three or four of these medicines but no other doctor had the time to go through and find out, try this or take them off.
- Victoria Sweet