Physicians From New York City

"Viral hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver caused by at least six different, mostly unrelated, viruses [hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D, E, and G (HAV, HBV, HCV, HDV, HEV, and HGV, respectively)]. It can occur in an acute form from which most patients experience a complete recovery. Acute viral hepatitis is characterized by an insidious onset, often with fever and severe malaise and loss of appetite for food, alcohol, and tobacco. Flu-like symptoms may occur early in the illness. The characteristic finding that occurs in many cases is the development of jaundice, a dramatic yellow discoloration of the skin and other surfaces. Symptoms may last for days or weeks. The acute disease usually results in complete recovery with lifelong immunity. Occasionally, acute hepatitis may advance to the fulminant phase; the patient does not recover, but develops liver failure and death may be rapid. Fortunately, this is rare. Hepatitis due to HAV and HEV is nearly always acute. Acute disease also may occur with HBV and probably HGV. HCV is usually chronic."

"Primary cancer of the liver (hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide; HBV is the major cause of HCC. A vaccine that protects against HBV infection was invented in 1969 and is now one of the most commonly used vaccines. National vaccination programs have dramatically reduced the prevalence of HBV infection and carriers, with a concomitant decrease in the incidence of HCC in the vaccine-impacted populations. HBV vaccine is the first widely used cancer prevention vaccine; a second that protects against papilloma virus and cancer of the cervix has recently been introduced."

"In his early years as a physician, Baruch Blumberg developed a keen interest in the genetic polymorphisms and environmental factors that influence disease development. In particular, he was interested in the lipoprotein subtypes that predispose certain individuals to heart disease. As a scientific researcher, Blumberg, while studying these protein fractions, encountered an unusual protein in the serum of Australian aborigine patients with serum hepatitis."

"In 1982 Barry visited Taiwan, where the director of the blood bank at a major hospital in Taipei showed him large refrigerators full of blood from people infected with hepatitis B. What should they do with all these contaminated bottles of blood, the director asked? Barry’s answer: they should make hepatitis B vaccine. The Taiwanese hospital adopted his recommendation, which led by 1984 to Taiwan establishing the world’s first program of universal hepatitis B vaccination."

"Poets, essayists, chroniclers, wags, and wise men write often about death but have rarely seem it. Physicians and nurses, who see it often, rarely write about it."

"Long after the theories on which they were based had been debunked, Galen's concepts of sickness and its treatment continued to have a pervasive influence on the daily practice of medicine. Indeed, it is a measure of medicine's progress over the past fifty years that a goodly number of his remedies were still being used until well into the twentieth century."

"Tradition is a persuasive teacher, even when what it teaches is erroneous."

"If there is one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are fifteen operations, you know that none of them work."

"The later decades of a life become the time for our capabliites to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentraled worth."

"In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness."

"The tendency toward mysticism is ingrained in human nature. Superstition, religion, and medicine have made their long journey together, and even now are unable to let go of one another's hands."

"With deep sedation or the blessed respite of terminal coma that comes to some at the end of a difficult struggle, the actual hour when the heart stops is indeed often tranquil. Many do, in this way, avoid a tormented passage; but many others are in physical and mental distress till nearly the last moment, or even at the last moment."

"Of hundreds of known diseases and their predisposing characteristics, some 85% of our aging population will succumb to the complications of one of only seven major entities: atherosclerosis, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, obesity, mental depressing states such as Alzheimer's and other dementias, cancer, and decreased resistance to infection. Many of those elderly who die will have several of them. And not only that; the personnel of any large hospital's intensive care unit can confirm the everyday observation that terminally ill people are not infrequently victims of all seven."

"There is considerable evidence that the lipoprotein abnormalities (high LDL and low HDL) that are linked to heart attack deaths in adulthood begin to develop in early childhood and that higher cholesterol levels eventually get “set” by early food habits. What we eat during our childhood affects our lifetime cholesterol levels. For many, changing the diet to a plant-based, low-saturated-fat diet in later life does not result in the favorable cholesterol levels that would have been seen if the dietary improvements were started much earlier in life."

"Populations with diets with little or no saturated fat have little or no heart disease. The development of heart disease begins in childhood. Not only do unhealthy childhood diets high in saturated fat and low in the protective micronutrients found in unprocessed plant foods accelerate heart disease, but they promote the aging process, and create a cellular environment favorable for the development of cancer. To add insult to injury, much of the processed foods children eat are rich in trans fat, a man-made fat that is also linked to cancer and heart disease. We could not have designed a cancer-causing environment more effectively if we scientifically planned it. We feed our children a diet high in saturated fat, add lots of processed foods with those dangerous (man-made) trans fats, and combine it with an insufficient intake of unrefined plant foods to guarantee sufficient phytochemical deprivation, and presto, we have created a nation rich in autoimmune illnesses, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and finally, heart disease and cancer."

"Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, and self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body’s powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. The chronic diseases commonly associated with aging—hypertension, coronary artery disease, Type II diabetes, degenerative joint disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, as well as most cancers—are not the inevitable outcome of the aging process; they are born out of wrong food choices earlier in life. Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Medical intervention does very little to slow the progression of illnesses and gradual mental and physical decline. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth."

"The most recent scientific evidence is both overwhelming and shocking—what we feed (or don't feed) our children as they grow from birth to early adulthood has a greater total contributory effect on the dietary contribution to cancers than dietary intake over the next fifty years."

"There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate, and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life. In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers."

"You can not buy health, you must earn it through healthy living."

"The modern diet is not slightly deficient in just a handful of micronutrients; it is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived, immunity-building compounds. These are not optional; you can't have a lifetime of good health without them."

"The modern food and drug industry has converted a significant portion of the world's people to a new religion—a massive cult of pleasure seekers who consume coffee, cigarettes, soft drinks, candy, chocolate, alcohol, processed foods, fast foods, and concentrated dairy fat (cheese) in a self-indulgent orgy of destructive behavior. When the inevitable results of such bad habits appear—pain, suffering, sickness, and disease—the addicted cult members drag themselves to physicians and demand drugs to alleviate their pain, mask their symptoms, and cure their diseases. These revelers become so drunk on their addictive behavior and the accompanying addictive thinking that they can no longer tell the difference between health and health care."

"Whether you eat a vegetarian diet or you include a very small amount of animal foods, for optimal health you must get the majority of calories from unrefined plant food with a minimal amount of animal products. A large quantity of unrefined plant food grants the greatest protection against developing serious disease."

"A diet optimally designed for adult humans would naturally be ideal for the children of that species, too. There are no special needs children have that would make them require a different diet. Even at the time of rapid growth and brain development, the optimal supply of energy and essential fats can be met by an appropriately planned vegetarian or vegan diet."

"As you begin to eat healthful, nutrient-dense foods, such as vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds, you flood your body with the vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that it so desperately needs. You will not only see immediate weight-loss benefits, your food preferences will also undergo a metamorphosis as you begin to crave health-supporting food instead of disease-causing food. The foods that once meant so much to you lose their appeal. And your bad emotionally based eating habits will start to disappear along with your waistline."

"When the ratio of nutrients to calories is high, fat melts away, and health is restored. The more nutrient-dense food you consume, the more you'll be satisfied with fewer calories, and the less you'll crave fat and high-calorie foods."

"A high-nutrient diet will reduce your desire for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. Within weeks, your taste buds will change, and you'll lose interest in the unhealthy foods you once thought you could never live without. You'll feel more satisfied eating fewer calories than you were eating before. The result is lasting health and permanent weight loss."

"[Responding to the argument that a plant-based diet is extreme] Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that “extreme”."

"There has to be a seismic revolution in medicine. Many of us are concerned that the medical schools are run by the pharmaceutical industry. You get all this marvelous training for illness. You become brilliant about diagnosing, and once something's diagnosed, you decide what drugs or procedures are required. Nobody asks, ‘Why do you have this hypertension?’ You don't suddenly wake up when you're 30 with hypertension. For the last thirty years, every time you consumed certain foods, your body took a hit. And it catches up to you."

"In all of western civilization, there is nothing more common than coronary artery heart disease, and that is because of the foods that most people eat every day."

"As a physician I am embarrassed by the lack of initiative and obstructionist policies of my own medical profession toward healthier lifestyles. This is not surprising. Physicians lack training and knowledge of nutrition and are self-serving when they proclaim “patients won't follow plant-based nutrition.” Having counseled patients with severe coronary artery heart disease for over twenty years, I find the opposite to be true. Patients sent home to die by expert cardiologists after failing bypass or stents rejoice as they lose weight, eliminate angina chest pains, lessen their medication, lower their blood sugars, decrease or come off their insulin, revert their positive stress test back to normal, selectively diminish the plaque plugging their arteries, and resume a fully active life empowered by the knowledge that they, not their physicians, have become the locus of control for the disease that was destroying them."

"I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all. I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition—specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts."

"The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. It leads me to seek happiness in the lap of, and love of my family, in the society of my neighbors, and my books, in the wholesome occupations of my farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection in every kind of bud that opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom of rest or motion, owing account to myself alone of my hours and actions."

"The differentiation of the neuroses from organic visceral diseases, Dr. Crohn said, "is one of the difficult problems in clinical medicine. Let him who is proud of his acumen and experience as a physician survey, from year to year, his own record in this respect, and his pride may take, will take, a severe fall. With his eyes wide open to the problem, with much experience with the world, people and moods, and with years of clinical training and knowledge, no one is immune to, at times, mistaking organic diseases for the neuroses, or of falsely interpreting neurotic symptoms in terms of pathological states."

"Most retired business people "know how to work but they don't know how to play; they are completely devoid of the spirit of relaxation and recreation. Such forced idleness is ruinous to the morale of many of the more capable men of affairs.""

"I have been studying inherited susceptibility of cancer through affected families. The goal is to identify genes that are involved in cancer development."

"I was attracted to studies of cancer families because epidemiological studies show that virtually all cancers manifest a tendency to aggregate in families. Close relatives of a cancer patient are at increased risk of that neoplasm, and perhaps other forms of cancer. The excess site-specific cancer risk is exceptionally high for carriers of certain cancer genes, in whom the attack rate can approach 100 percent. In candidate cancer families, the possibility that clustering is on the basis of chance must be excluded through epidemiological studies that establish the presence of an excess cancer risk. Predisposed families are candidates for laboratory studies to identify the inherited susceptibility factors. These investigations have led to the identification and isolation of human cancer genes, the tumor suppressor genes. These cancer genes are among more than 200 single-gene traits associated with the development of cancer. Approximately a dozen inherited susceptibility genes have been definitively identified, and many more are being sought. From studies of retinoblastoma and other rare cancers, important new information was generated about the fundamental biology of cancers that arise in many patients. Isolation of an inherited cancer susceptibility gene provides opportunities for presymptomatic testing of at-risk relatives. However, testing of healthy individuals also raise important issues regarding informed consent, confidentiality and potential for adverse psychological, social and economic effects."

"There is within each of us a "life-instinct," which is forever working toward health, happiness, and all that makes for more life for the individual."

"A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment."

"A gaffe in Washington is when a politician inadvertently reveals the truth, especially about himself."

"I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes."

"Each day of those early years in pediatric surgery I felt I was on the cutting edge. Some of the surgical problems that landed on the operating table at Children's had not even been named. Many of the operations I performed had never been done before. It was an exuberant feeling, but also a little scary. At times I was troubled by fears that I wasn't doing things the right way, that I would have regrets, or that someone else had performed a certain procedure successfully but had never bothered to write it up for the medical journals, or if they had I couldn't find it."

"There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent."

"In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don’t.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule."

"Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637."

"Communism always had sympathetic Westerners who amounted to a fifth column, including communist parties and intellectuals. Its appeal made it a double threat, internal and external. In the old days, communist parties were on the verge of getting parliamentary majorities in some European countries. That threat doesn't exist with Islam. The fundamentalists have nothing like that demographic or political import, even in Europe. The Muslim population in America is not much fundamentalist, nor radicalized. Rather, it accepts American religious pluralism and lives, like other religions, in a quite harmonious and pluralistic way. Of all the ideologies remaining in the world in the debris of the collapsed Soviet empire, fundamentalist Islam is the only one that, at least in our lifetime, appears to pose a serious problem to the West. It's the only expressly anti-Western ideology of any importance in the world and it means to destroy the Western position, Western institutions, Western culture, wherever it can. This occurred in Iran, and will happen again in Algeria. Should fundamentalists take power in Egypt, there will be profound geopolitical consequences. A region very important to us will be destabilized, with many problems resulting. Once that happens, we'll be asking ourselves why we weren't worrying about this years ago."

"There's something in the Western psyche, especially the Western liberal, pluralistic psyche, that finds it impossible to believe that radical ideologues mean what they say. We didn't believe communists or fascists, and in the early days we found it impossible to believe the Khomeinists. Yet these are people who do believe what they say. Attempts to moderate their behavior invariably fail; these are exercises in our heads. We need a policy of strong opposition to the fundamentalists and of strong support for those Muslims who stand up to them."

"Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country — and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians."

"In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today’s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead."

"Late in the game, Blue's king was under savage attack by Kasparov. Any human player under such assault by a world champion would be staring at his own king trying to figure out how to get away. Instead, Blue ignored the threat and quite nonchalantly went hunting for lowly pawns at the other end of the board. In fact, at the point of maximum peril, Blue expended two moves--many have died giving Kasparov even one--to snap one pawn. It was as if, at Gettysburg, General Meade had sent his soldiers out for a bit of apple picking moments before Pickett's charge because he had calculated that they could get back to their positions with a half-second to spare."

"Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity — assimilation — simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."