God's Hotel Quotes

“They ate and drank moderately, walked a lot, and had real vacations: They had not forgotten Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman. Page”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“how many of those I called Bad Boys and Bad Girls were, in reality, spiritually thirsty and spiritually sick. Perhaps they were the most sensitive, the most easily hurt of all my patients, the most tortured by the human fate of knowing we are going to die.”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“In the Middle Ages, charity was accepted as doing as much for the giver as it did for the receiver,”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“The West’s unique and, when you thought about it, surprising ideal—that a society should take care of its sick poor—had originated in those monastic hospices and infirmaries of the Middle Ages. But”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“interchangeable. The essence of hospitality—hospes—is that guest and host are identical, if not in the moment, then at some moment. Whatever our current role, it was temporary. With time and the seasons, a host goes traveling and becomes a guest; a guest returns home and becomes a host. That is what the word hospitality encodes. And in a hospital, the meaning of that interchangeability is even more profound, because in the hospital, every host will for sure become a guest; every doctor, a patient. That”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“I was amazed at how expensive economists thought doctors were. They instituted many economic maneuvers—de-skilling medicine onto nurses and physician assistants; computerizing medical decision-making; substituting algorithms for thinking—because they assumed that doctors were such expensive commodities. And yet doctors were not expensive, at least, not the doctors I knew. We cost no more than the nurses, the middle managers, and the information technicians, alas. Adding up all the time I spent with Mrs. Muller, the cost of her accurate diagnosis was about the same as one MRI scan, wholesale. Economists did the same thing with the other remedies of premodern medicine—good food, quiet surroundings, and the little things—treating them as expensive luxuries and cutting them out of their calculations. At Laguna Honda, for instance, while most patients were on fifteen or even twenty daily medications, many of which they didn’t need, the budget for a patient’s daily meals had been pared down to seven dollars, which could supply only the basics. I began to wonder: Had economists ever applied their standard of evidence-based medicine to their own economic assumptions? Under what conditions, with which patients and which diseases was it cost-effective to trade good food, clean surroundings, and doctor time for medications, tests, and procedures? Especially ones that patients didn’t need? Although Mrs. Muller was an impressive example of Laguna Honda’s Slow Medicine, she wasn’t the only one. Almost every patient I admitted had incorrect or outmoded diagnoses and was taking medications for them, too. Medications that required regular blood tests; caused side effects that necessitated still more medications; and put the patient at risk for adverse reactions. Typically my patients came in taking fifteen to twenty-five medications, of which they ended up needing, usually, only six or seven. And medications, even the cheapest, were expensive. Adding in the cost of side effects, lab tests, adverse reactions, and the time pharmacists, doctors, and nurses needed to prepare, order, and administer them, each medication cost something like six or seven dollars a day. So Laguna Honda’s Slow Medicine, to the extent that it led to discontinuing ten or twelve unnecessary medications, was more efficient than efficient health care by at least seventy dollars per day. I”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“But the flesh of the dead body is thick and doughy, cool where you expect it to be warm, doughy where you expect it to be resilient.”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“we were no longer getting the psychotic, drug-abusing criminals that Dr. Romero had tried so hard to stop from being admitted.”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“To wit: A van dropped him off at the lobby of his skid-row hotel. I”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“Since Dr. Rajif was on vacation, I attended in his stead.”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“I can’t say I knew what made him tick,”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

“they were as different from all the denizens of Laguna Honda—doctors, nurses, patients, and administrators—as their virtual health care and rehabilitation facility would be from the hospital we knew so well. It”
― Victoria Sweet, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine