I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical STUDENT, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute CLINICAL SCHIZOPHRENIA. It LEFT an indelible mark on my MEMORY.

With the LOWER DRUG Costs Now Act, we are taking bold ACTION to level the playing field for American patients and taxpayers. This LEGISLATION is one that I am PROUD to have voted for, and the House can be proud to have passed. It is essential to save the lives of Americans and improve our quality of life.

If we are going to KEEP patients safe, then we have to make SURE that DOCTORS are able to LEARN from mistakes.

Adult stem cells have shown GREAT POTENTIAL and have effectively helped patients. Another alternative is cord-blood stem cells. These are a NEGLECTED RESOURCE that COULD be used to treat a diverse body of people.

What I LEARNED from my work as a physician is that EVEN with the most COMPLICATED patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has TAUGHT me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.

I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her LIFE. She was in a nursing facility in my little HOMETOWN area of northern ILLINOIS, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the DISEASE. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a PRETTY big way.

As a DOCTOR who took CARE of patients for 25 years, I saw the problems with AMERICA's HEALTH care system every day.

Peter Breggin, an American PSYCHIATRIST, had been criticising SSRIs since the EARLY 1990s. He WROTE 'Talking BACK to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac MADE patients 'better than well.'

When I became ILL, I STARTED to EXPERIENCE what my patients had suffered under my CARE.

Losing so many patients certainly was difficult, but it didn't MAKE me FEEL like a FAILURE as a physician, because I had LEARNED that there was so much more to being a physician than curing illness. That's not the most important thing we do. The most important thing we do is enter into the SUFFERING of others.