Quotes About Treatment

Suffer from depression. That's right. It is suffering. A person does not just have depression. She suffers from it.

It was simply because, as a doctor, I don't believe a drug should be taken for anything that is just uncomfortable or self-limiting.

A surgeon gets $500 for taking out a tumor. A pathologist gets five dollars for examining it, making a diagnosis, recommending further treatment, and predicting the patient's future.

What we do to the animals is perhaps their hell

The demand being made of me was to treat the breakdown as if fear and frustration were not a part of it, to act as if my life, the whole life, has not changed.

Over coffee Mr. Hollick proposed that Babà go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr. Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be "looked after.

We're good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides—an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys—and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.

We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.

The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.

Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it. This

The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world. Most doctors treat disease and figure that the rest will take care of itself.

We said the medicines we gave him may have contributed to it.

In most cases, it wasn't technology that failed. Rather, the physicians did not consider the correct diagnosis in the first place.

What's the shortest time you've seen and the longest time you've seen for people who took no treatment? Three months was the shortest, she said, three years the longest. And with treatment? She got mumbly. Finally she said that the longest might not have been that much more than three years. But with treatment, the average should shift toward the longer end.

anyone who really knows what it is like to cut a stomach cancer from a patient

When the patient complained of pain, Goodman refused to admit that anything needed to be done.

How long has she been without an airway?

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians.

two-thirds of such complications were due to errors in care.

Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can't eat on your own?

The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The

For all these reasons, the operation is at best a last resort

those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.