Quotes About Patients

I always remind my team to take a step back and ask themselves, 'Why are we doing this?' For us, 100% of the time, it is to better serve our patients, consumers, and customers. This is a great question to come back to when your team is losing focus; it reduces stress and mobilizes people to get excited about the collective possibility.

Ever since I got to know how easily skin donation can save the lives of serious burns patients, I have felt strongly about the issue.

HCl is the formula for hydrochloric acid," the label began, and explained that this acid is an aid to human digestion. Then the unexpected detail: the see-through pipes were filled with human vomit, "donated by anonymous patients from a bulimic clinic." You admire the artistry and form, and then, told what it represented, you gaze with nauseated horror.

Because all the sick do not recover, therefore medicine is not an art.

Fear is a primal emotion in medicine. Every doctor can tell you of times when she or he was terrified; most can list more episodes than you might wish to hear. [...] It may be sublimated at times, it may wax and wane, but the fear of harming your patients never departs; it is inextricably linked to the practice of medicine.

To empathize with these patients, to put yourself in their shoes, may be a bit too existentially disconcerting. And so doctors unconsciously try to protect themselves by widening the moat between their own good health and their patients' dauntingly mortal conditions

Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.

I was relieved to come across a more expansive population study of nearly seventy thousand patients that showed that the medical care given to overweight patients is no different than what non-overweight patients receive.14 Despite an ingrained societal bias against obesity—one that affects physicians as well as patients—the medical profession seems to be able to deliver comparable treatment.

But while the patient does bear some responsibility, I believe that the onus falls more heavily on the doctor to be attuned to the factors--cultural, ethnic, or just personal style--that influence how patients present their symptoms.

Giving patients the information that they need—not necessarily the standard of care in 1964—goes a long way toward relieving the anxiety and fear that worsen pain. But what was impressive was the magnitude of the effect. The group with the extra discussion needed half the amount of pain medication that the control group needed.

Wilson-Donovan wanted to move ahead as quickly as possible to clinical trials on patients, which was why it was so important to test Vicotec's safety now before the FDA hearings in September, which would hopefully put it on the "Fast Track." Peter was absolutely sure that the testing being concluded by Paul-Louis Suchard, the head of the laboratory in Paris, would only confirm the good news he had just been given in Geneva.

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying: 'Dave, you have painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the American health-care system. Not all patients wind up being as wretched as Mary! Many of them wind up being dead'.

Many research studies, as well as my own clinical experience, have confirmed that severely depressed patients who appear very biologically depressed with lots of physical symptoms often respond rapidly to cognitive therapy alone without any drugs.5

Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus.

Tooth decay was a perennial national problem that meant a mouthful of silver for patients, and for dentists a pocketful of gold.

Undiagnosed DID patients received incorrect diagnoses of schizophrenia in 25% to 40% of cases in two large series (Putnam, 1989; Ross, 1989), while in one series 12% and in the other 16% had received electroconvulsive therapy.

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.

The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

A minority of the mentally ill stalkers who are arrested are deemed to be incurable, either because of their condition or because of their refusal to take medication. Many present a real danger to those they've focused on. Yet mental institutions are often unwilling to accept mentally ill patients prone to violence.

My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.

I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her life. She was in a nursing facility in my little hometown area of northern Illinois, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the disease. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a pretty big way.

The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.

The more I removed vegetables that have lots of seeds, such as cucumbers and squash, the better my patients felt, the more weight they lost, and the more their cholesterol levels improved.

The fact remains that many of the most creative and innovative hypotheses that are eventually verified by empirical research are born in the consulting room out of practitioners' work with individual patients.