The often heard 'time is money' formula is today generally applied to all human activities: it implies that a gain in time is a gain in money, with the consequence of introducing a generalized pressure to minimize the execution time of all and every human operation. There are however processes that are just destroyed when their execution speed becomes faster and faster: any music piece, whose time structure is essential, is a prototype of these phenomena. Two apparently remote phenomena as the doctor-patient interaction and the control of global climatic change belong for different reasons to the same category of phenomena the priority of which cannot be derived using the 'time is money' formula but requires - before any accounting calculation - considering their intrinsic value for health and medicine.