Political Quotes

“I first got interested in diseases of women a number of years ago when in my Las Vegas office three women came to see me. They didn't want to be there. They were embarrassed for being there. They had a condition. It is called interstitial fasciitis. I had never heard the words before, and it is still hard for me to say these words after all of these years. But I looked into this. The NIH and the scientific community and the country thought this was a psychosomatic disease; that this was something these women had in their head; that even though each of them described the pain the same--like slivers of glass being shoved up and down their bladder--it was all in their head. I had the good fortune of having a woman, who is an orthopedic surgeon, who had this same condition, and she said: This is not in my head, it is in my bladder, and something should be done to study this. We have begged the NIH to do it. We have had others that we have asked to do it, and they are not doing anything: You, Senator Reid, should have something done about this. And we did this. We established a registry. We did that by legislation. As a result of that, now almost 50 percent of the people who have that disease have medicine to take that takes away their symptoms, the pain. It is pretty good. Have we cured the disease? No, we haven't. But progress has been made because, as policymakers, that is what we do. We set policy.…”