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" A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off. "
Alice Dreger
Leave
Twins
Hospital
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" Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less. "
Alice Dreger
Small
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" According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust - lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them. "
Alice Dreger
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" We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. "
Alice Dreger
Sex
Nature
Enough
" If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students' sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We're not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence. "
Alice Dreger
Violence
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Worry
" Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money. "
Alice Dreger
Simple
Money
Name
" As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic. "
Alice Dreger
Time
Swimming
Long
" When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus. "
Alice Dreger
Food
Hair
Long
" I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food. "
Alice Dreger
Mother
Food
Childhood
" The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let's be honest. It isn't the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field. "
Alice Dreger
Good
Honest
Safety
" When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong. "
Alice Dreger
Done
Hard Work
Science
" Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair. "
Alice Dreger
Medicine
Democracy
Service
" I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally. "
Alice Dreger
Feel
Alone
Science
" I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century. "
Alice Dreger
Work
Time
School
" You can't go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can't stop you from trying. "
Alice Dreger
Stop
You
Understanding
" Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be. "
Alice Dreger
Mistakes
Always
History
" I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight. "
Alice Dreger
People
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History
" Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians. "
Alice Dreger
Mean
Us
Will
" I am led by what I find to be true, not what I find to be popular. "
Alice Dreger
Find
True
Popular
" After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law. "
Alice Dreger
College
Age
School
" Conjoined twins simply may not need sex-romance partners as much as the rest of us do. Throughout time and space, they have described their condition as something like being attached to a soul mate. "
Alice Dreger
Twins
Need
Rest
" Ironically, when I've asked my straight friends to join me in hanging a rainbow flag, they answer, 'But someone might think we're gay,' not realizing that is exactly the point. To be mistaken for the oppressed is to momentarily become the oppressed. "
Alice Dreger
Flag
Think
Rainbow
" What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off. "
Alice Dreger
Health
Twins
Hospital