Quotes About Patients

Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.

Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer.

Take MediCal and Medicaid patients. All people have a right to quality care and they will teach you as much or more as your insurance and cash patients do.

Yes, there is no hope. But remember, some fuses are duds, some tumors are benign, some heart patients recover on their own. You have time to change your life.

Given one well-trained physician of the highest type and he will do better work for a thousand people than ten specialists.

I think that the practice of medicine, the science of it, has become 50% pharmacological, so that doctors are like walking pharmacies.

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

I do not practice clinical medicine and hence do not treat individual patients. My career is in medical science.

I would like the Medical Society to be one of the resources for information about the influences that have an impact on our patients and our practices.

None of the patients could say the experiments didn't yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day fora ll staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated.

It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts.

Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.

moribund patients, conducting autopsies on them all and EEGs on some.

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.

If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.

A Holiday Inn restaurant with unshrouded windows! We sat by one, looking out at the tumbling tiny Virgin River while the Muzak doggedly chewed and swallowed Scatterbrain: "STILL it's CHAR ming CHAT ter SCAT ter BRAIN." During the meal Katharine talked about Barry: "We were at dinner once, in Los Angeles, and a girl came over to the table, one of his patients that he hadn't seen for

Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.

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

This skewing of physicians' thinking leads to poor care. What is remarkable is not merely the consequences of a doctor's negative emotions. Despite research showing that most patients pickup on the physician's negativity, few of them understand its effect on their medical care and rarely change doctors because of it.

What a doctor wants... is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.

Often, indeed, individuals are most capable of deciding on the best provider of services. But not always, and in some domains choice is particularly fraught. In healthcare, for example, choices pertaining to physicians or hospitals are made either when patients are healthy and disinclined to bother with medical matters, or when they are sick and therefore more anxious about their decisions, which diminishes their ability to process complex and often conflicting metrics.

The phenomenon of risk-aversion means that some patients whose lives might be saved by a risky operation are simply never operated upon. But there is also the reverse problem, that of overly aggressive care to meet metric targets. Patients whose operations are not successful may be kept alive for the requisite thirty days to improve their hospital's mortality data, a prolongation that is both costly and inhumane.

the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included: 820 cases of diarrhea; 154, constipation; 21, hemorrhoids; 434, indigestion; 365, foreign bodies in the eyes; 364, severe headaches; 594 episodes of fainting, syncope , and exhaustion; 1 case of extreme flatulence; and 169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.