Therapeutic Quotes (6 quotes)
Building goes on briskly at the therapeutic Tower of Babel; what one recommends another condemns; what one gives in large doses another scarce dares to prescribe in small doses; and what one vaunts as a novelty another thinks not worth rescuing from merited oblivion. All is confusion, contradiction, inconceivable chaos. Every country, every place, almost every doctor, have their own pet remedies, without which they imagine their patients can not be cured; and all this changes every year, aye every mouth.
Weekly Medical Gazette, of Vienna
In my opinion, the American “war on drugs” represents merely a new variation in humanity’s age-old passion to “purge” itself of its “impurities” by staging vast dramas of scapegoat persecutions. In the past, we have witnessed religious or “holy” wars waged against people who professed the wrong faith; … now we are witnessing a medical or “therapeutic” war, waged against people who use the wrong drugs.
From 'The Morality of Drug Controls', collected in Ronald Hamowy (ed.), Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of Government Control (1987), 329.
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychiatry from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us and the new and different concepts of illness and health.
News summaries 29 Apr 56
The idea that something in food might be of advantage to patients with pernicious anemia was in my mind in 1912, when I was a house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital…. Ever since my student days, when I had the opportunity, in my father’s wards at the Massachusetts General Hospital, … I have taken a deep interest in this disease. … Prolonged observation permitted me to become acquainted with the multiple variations and many aspects of the disease, and to realize that from a few cases it was difficult to determine the effect of therapeutic procedures.
From Nobel Prize Lecture (12 Dec 1934), collected in Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922-1941 (1965).
The question of protection against the noxious action of the X rays appears to be assuming more and more importance, as we begin to recognise the searching nature of their action on the deep-seated tissues and their far-reaching therapeutic effect on the internal organs.
In 'Protection in X-Ray Work', Archives of the Roentgen Ray (July 1905), 10, No. 2, 38. [Note that this concern for protection, written in 1905, comes within 10 years of the discovery of X-Rays in 1895. —Webmaster]
The war on drugs must be a metaphorical war. But that … has to do with our stubborn determination not to come to grips with what a drug is: … our refusal to recognize that the term “drug” is not only a medical but also a political concept. … In short, while seemingly the word “drug” is a part of the vocabulary of science, it is even more importantly a part of the vocabulary of politics. … A drug is either good or bad, effective or ineffective, therapeutic or noxious, licit or illicit. … We deploy them simultaneously as technical tools in our fight against medical diseases and as scapegoats in our struggle for personal security and political stability.
From 'The Morality of Drug Controls', collected in Ronald Hamowy (ed.), Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of Government Control (1987), 328.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
