Quotes from Jerome Groopman

Hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them.

I had learned that every patient has the right to hope, despite long odds, and it was my role to help nurture that hope.

Hope can be imagined as a domino effect, a chain reaction, each increment making the next increase more feasible... There are moments of fear and doubt that can deflate it.

Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind's eye - a path to a better future.

I feel that I have to do everything better just to be judged as okay. It is something I wish I could let go of. It's something that I wish just wasn't there.

Statistics cannot substitute for the human being before you; statistics embody averages, not individuals.

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues.

A book is an experiment, and as with all experiments, there is a sense of uncertainty about how it will turn out.

Despite education and knowledge and experience, when you are the patient--suffering, confused, and despairing--it is very, very hard to take matters into your own hands. I was not a George Griffin, able to stand alone and challenge the prevailing assumptions. I needed an external voice, strong and determined, to guide me.

This is the vicious cycle. When we feel pain from our physical debility, that pain amplifies our sense of hopelessness; the less hopeful we feel, the fewer endorphins and enkephalins and the more CCK we release. The more pain we experience due to these neurochemicals, the less able we are to feel hope.

Researchers are learning that a change in mind-set has the power to alter neurochemistry. Belief and expectation—the key elements of hope—can block pain by releasing the brain's endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine.

True hope has no room for delusion.

also risks of taking statins. To be sure, seeing a person in front of you has a greater impact than hearing about side effects secondhand. But even secondhand stories affect the way people think. We have also observed in

Finding something may be satisfactory, but not finding everything is suboptimal. (Dr. Pat Croskerry)

suffered muscle pain, the most common side effect of statins, or someone else who developed liver toxicity and gastrointestinal upset, which are less common

to taking an action that could make life even worse. Psychologists call this "loss aversion." Research in cognitive

Understanding statistics about the risks and benefits of a treatment is called "health literacy." It

or she would choose the treatment option that the experts saw as "best," in this case taking the medication. But in the Dartmouth study, this was not what happened. When given clearer information, the patients weighed the risks and benefits

their preferences about starting medications for elevated blood pressure or a high cholesterol level. Although guidelines usually have fine print at the bottom asserting that the recommendations need to be molded to the preferences, values, and goals of the individual patient, we believe that this statement should be in large

The probability that a diagnostic test will be positive if the disease is present (sensitivity), the probability that a test would be negative if the disease is absent (specificity).