Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.
Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.
My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.
After I spent my compulsory army service in the 'top secret office' of the Medical Forces, where I was fortunate to be exposed to clinical and medical issues, I enrolled to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.
I'm consumed with tech - medical, computational, impossible tech. So, I don't know exactly what I'll wind up doing, where I'll go with all this schooling, but I'm willing that it be better than my dogmatic vision of it all.
Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.
Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.
Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.
The World Bank and others have been converted to conditional cash transfers (CCT). These provide poor people with cash on condition they send their children to school and for medical treatment.
The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.
Medical decisions have been politicized. What doctor wants a state legislator in his consulting room?
Out of one pocket we pay billions of our tax dollars to support the production of expensive, disease-causing foods. Out of the other pocket, we pay medical bills that are too high because our overweight population consumes too much of these rich, disease-causing foods.
But I contend that if we're providing total medical coverage for every man, woman, and child in Iraq, shouldn't we at least be doing the same thing for every man, woman, and child in the United States?
In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English.
My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.
I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
When my husband turned 40, I was obsessed. 'Has he had his medical checkup?' He needed to go to the doctor; he needed to go to the dentist. Any little cough, I was really on him. Then he turned 40, and I thought, 'Maybe that's why I've been so obsessed with his health!'
I've had years of psychiatry, and I ask about every six months - it's sort of like getting your oil checked - I ask, 'I'm not an actual narcissist, am I?' The learned men of psychiatry assure me that I meet none of the medical criteria.
It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
