Simple intervention - the time spent with a patient - is a very powerful ingredient of the patient-doctor contract. The evidence is against the traditions such as surgery for back pain being true - the evidence says it doesn't work.

Why are we, the most medicalized of societies, a culture in pain?

Like an animal, cancer sleeps, prowls, hibernates, turns surly or placid.

It wasn't just that my breasts were sore and my legs seethed with restlessness at night. A knitted cap seemed to have settled on my brain as well. Never think that pregnancy is just a spare room in a woman's house; it changes everything - the heat, the light, the furniture.

At a certain point, the soul exits from a cherished photograph, because we have come to the end of our loving projection into that moment.

These doctors, who had long experience with people in pain in addition to their traditional training and schooling, had discovered that nothing happens without communication, treatment based on evidence of outcome, and what used to be called a good bedside manner.

The first axiom of the family vacation is that someone, possibly everyone, will get sick.