As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.
Some genetic variants can be informative about one's risk for Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
People are used to dealing with risk. You are told if you smoke, you are at higher risk of lung cancer. And I think people are able to also understand, when they are told they are a carrier for a genetic disease, that is not a risk to them personally but something that they could pass on to children.
There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
Having cancer is one thing; looking like you have cancer is another thing. It's a disease that already takes so much.
Any movement at all that reduces disease, that reduces overdoses, that reduces property crime, that reduces violent crime, is good.
We'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease.
Cervical cancer doesn't discriminate by how much money you have. The disease affects so many - it's frightening.
Haiti is not an easy place to fight disease, even in the best of times. That was true even before a devastating earthquake ravaged Haiti's capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, in 2010.
Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts.
I do good in the world - at least I try to. I speak on behalf of women, and I know I have made the lives of women happier as a result of teaching them what I have learned relative to true health rather than disease care.
We're in a situation now where weight and extreme weight and heart disease is the biggest killer in this country today.
I have a blend of klotho gene variants that have been linked with a lower risk for coronary artery disease and stroke and an advantage in longevity.
The importance of heart health became very real for me when my father died of heart disease seven years ago. Having experienced the loss first hand, I am inspired to do everything I can to break the cycle and prevent families from losing loved ones to this preventable disease.
Drug abuse is a very difficult disease.
I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
I'm generally considered a conservative in my predictions for disease.
Medicine has been successful by treating diseases in a very specific way once the damage is done. But telomere length integrates a lot of factors together and gives you an overall picture of risk for what is now emerging as a lot of diseases that tend to occur together, such as diabetes and heart disease.
If you have 100 acres worth of food, and you've got 500 animals out there, the young ones and the old ones are going to starve to death because they can't compete. When they starve, they start to eat things they shouldn't be eating and spread disease not only to them but to us.
The American diet causes disease. It is composed of 25 percent animal products and 62 percent processed foods and only 5 percent of calories from fruits and vegetables.
Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can't-afford-it attitude.
What I think a doctor should do is prevent disease, by any means necessary.
The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.
