Quotes About Patients

doctors don't think probabilities apply to their patients

We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.

In Redelmeier's experience, doctors did not think statistically. "Eighty percent of doctors don't think probabilities apply to their patients," he said. "Just like 95 percent of married couples don't believe the 50 percent divorce rate applies to them, and 95 percent of drunk drivers don't think the statistics that show that you are more likely to be killed if you are driving drunk than if you are driving sober applies to them.

nurse at a VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas, had the bright idea of using bar codes on patients and medications to match them up

Note that patients in hospital in 1830 were prescribed eight pints of beer a day.

My job as the doctor is to provide my patients with the information and services they need to make the best decisions for them and their families. Medicine is complex, and every situation is different.

The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.

It was Broom's habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later.

A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 percent lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion.

there are about seven thousand rare diseases—so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all.

The doctor explained that this type of relapse occurred in less than ten percent of childhood leukemia patients, and that Megan would require frequent spinal taps to inject chemotherapy drugs directly into her cerebrospinal fluid.

But the reasons why Hector was unhappy were quite complex. He didn't really want to think about it, perhaps because those reasons weren't so easy to accept. It even made him feel a little afraid. He knew this fear too well, it was what stopped his patients from being able to really think about their problems, and it was his job to help them overcome this fear and understand what was happening to them.

The epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.

I believed that the worst thing you can do for a poorly delivered service is to get more physicians or patients to try it and find out how bad it is.

You have to learn when to care, son. His father's voice. And when to let go. You'll grow calluses. He never had. Storm him, he never had. It was why he'd never made a good surgeon. He couldn't lose patients.

Few years ago when I visited a palliative care centre in Chennai for the first time, it completely moved me. It's an emotionally draining experience. I saw and met patients who were abandoned by their families, and there is complete sense of hopelessness. Ever since, I have been a supporter for the need for funding and awareness of palliative care.

Google is one of the most incredible breakthroughs that we have today. Yes, it can scare a lot of patients, thinking we're all dying because we look up something on Google. But there's also a lot of anecdotal information from parents, firsthand accounts of what they did for their own child.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.

A doctor can only treat patients. A doctor can only help the people who are shot or who are injured. But a politician can stop people from injuries. A politician can take a step so that no person is scared tomorrow.

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.

Wearable technology will tell us how well we are sleeping and whether we need to exercise. Sensors in the street will help us avoid traffic jams and find parking. Telemedicine applications will allow physicians to treat patients who are hundreds of miles away.

It's unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.

If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.