Quotes About Doctors

Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that's because they do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock," Felix Silverstone

Medical care is about our life and death, and we've always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and

Doctors lined up for the bags, even when they had to give away their phone numbers and addresses, just to get something to hold all the free merchandise they were collecting.

we pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise. This certainly is a factor. But the issue isn't merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.

Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, chaplains, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now—much as nursing home reformers deploy staff to help people with severe disabilities. In terminal illness that means focusing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as feasible, or getting out with family once in a while—

Doctors with high confidence in a judgment they made proved no more accurate than doctors with low confidence.

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity — and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question — still unanswered — is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity.

doctors can be stubborn about changing the way we do things.

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice.

The reason has to be that doctors remain at least partly motivated by the hope of doing meaningful and respected work for people and society.

For this reason, doctors are seldom outraged when the press reports yet another medical horror story. They usually have a different reaction: That could be me.

The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

The doctors were often not recognized to be dangerous until they had done considerable damage.

what treatments they were being given

not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in the priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We'll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, chaplains, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now—

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

The necessity of nature's final victory was expected and accepted in generations before our own. Doctors were far more willing to recognize the signs of defeat and far less arrogant about denying them.

But once he put his recommendations down on paper it was hard for hospitals and medical groups not to follow through and hold doctors to the plan.

In a year, fewer than three hundred doctors will complete geriatrics training in the United States, not nearly enough to replace the geriatricians going into retirement, let alone meet the needs of the next decade. Geriatric psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers are equally needed, and in no better supply.

Doctors may recommend the operation out of concern for their patients' health, but the stigma of obesity is clearly what drives many patients to the operating room.

that doctors avoid them in order to cover up evidence of malpractice.

Medical textbooks of the day make it clear that these doctors brought their patients to orgasm. In fact, the mechanical vibrator was invented at the end of the nineteenth century to relieve physicians of this tedious and time-consuming chore!

Ihm dröhnte der Kopf von den revolutionären Sprüchen, mit denen sowohl die Schwestern als auch die Ärzte ihn in jeder wachen Stunde eindeckten.

Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don't call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy.