Doctors Patients Quotes

“Perhaps this is the solution to medicine's midlife crisis, too: doctors focusing on their noble craft, their relationships with patients, the stuff over which we have some control. Ultimately, this may be the best hope for our professional salvation.”

— Sandeep Jauhar

“Ultimately the judge threw Moore's suit out of court, saying he had no case. Ironically, in his decision, the judge cited the HeLa cell line as a precedent for what happened with the Mo cell line. The fact that no one had sued over the growth or ownership of the HeLa cell line, he said, illustrated that patients didn't mind when doctors took their cells and turned them into commercial products. The judge believed Moore was unusual in his objections. But in fact, he was simply the first to realize there was something potentially objectionable going on.”

— Rebecca Skloot

“Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge.”

— Rebecca Skloot

“Moist was sure doctors keep skeletons around to cow patients. Nyer, nyer, we know what you look underneath ...”

— Terry Pratchett

“The important question isn't how to keep bad physicians from harming patient; it's how to keep good physicians from harming patients. Medical malpractice suits are a remarkably ineffective remedy.
(In reference to a Harvard Medical Practice Study) ... fewer than 2 percent of the patients who had received substandard care ever filed suit. Conversely, only a small minority among patients who did sue had in fact been victims of negligent care. And a patient's likelihood of winning a suit depended primarily on how poor his or her outcome was, regardless of whether that outcome was caused by disease or unavoidable risks of care. The deeper problem with medical malpractice is that by demonizing errors they prevent doctors from acknowledging & discussing them publicly. The tort system makes adversaries of patient & physician, and pushes each other to offer a heavily slanted version of events.
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— Atul Gawande

“Consider the case of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its elderly residents have unusually low end-of-life hospital costs. During their last six months, according to Medicare data, they spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average, and there's no sign that doctors or patients are halting care prematurely. Despite average rates of obesity and smoking, their life expectancy outpaces the national mean by a year.”

— Atul Gawande

“A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.”

— Atul Gawande

“There are two things panic patients hate to do. They hate to take medication - and they hate to go to doctors. They hate to come to grips.”

— Earl Campbell

“An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where they've left off from the previous visit. It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants
the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood and chemotherapies from clothing. The nurses know the name of your daughter's stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.”

— Jodi Picoult

“I only worked theater jobs, but they were all really silly when I first graduated. I was a line monitor at 'Spamalot,' which means I got there at 8 A.M. and told people how much the tickets were for standing room. I was an NYU Medical School fake patient, to teach doctors how to talk to patients.”

— Lauren Worsham

“He thinks I'm having trouble expressing my feelings, which is why he suggested I write in a journal-to get it out, he said, like in the old days when physicians used to bleed their patients in order to drain the mysterious poisons. Which almost always ended up killing them in spite of the doctors' good intentions, I might point out.”

— Cynthia Hand

“Patients who trust their doctors and have a psychological expectation of getting better could trigger a reaction in their body.”

— Irving Kirsch

“I did a show called 'Wonderland' a few years back, and I was fortunate enough to spend a full-on two weeks - I'm talking 13-15 hours a day - with the doctors and patients at Bellevue in New York. That served me well for 'Durham County.'”

— Michelle Forbes

“Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.”

— Charles C. Mann

“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.”

— Dianne Feinstein

“We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.”

— David Horowitz

“Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the 'slippery slope': once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.”

— Peter Singer

“Other doctors lose as many patients as I do, he would say. But with me they die happier.”

— Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez

“I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.”

— Virginia Postrel

“To date, there is no strong empirical support for claims that automating medical record keeping will lead to major reductions in health-care costs or significant improvements in the well-being of patients. But if doctors and patients have seen few benefits from the scramble to automate record keeping, the companies that supply the systems have profited. Cerner Corporation, a medical software outfit, saw its revenues triple, from $1 billion to $3 billion, between 2005 and 2013. Cerner, as it happens, was one of five corporations that provided RAND with funding for the original 2005 study. The other sponsors, which included General Electric and Hewlett Packard, also have substantial business interests in health-care automation. As today's flawed systems are replaced or upgraded in the future, to fix their interoperability problems and other shortcomings, information technology companies will reap further windfalls.”

— Nicholas Carr

“If you think you can just go out and ask all the doctors in the world about what the did to all the patients and you think we can connect that into something useful, go talk to someone who has done that because we can't.”

— James Heywood

“So the effect of this Republican provision to allow doctors to be gagged from even discussing abortion with their patients is outrageous.”

— Frank Lautenberg

“Doctors frequently get it wrong. One out of five patients today is in the hospital because incorrect treatment by a physician put him or her there.”

— Andrew Saul

“Treating only terminal cancer patients, the Rand (anti-cancer) vaccine produced objective improvement in 35% of 600 patients while another 30% demonstrated subjective improvement. FDA stopped the vaccine's use in a federal court hearing where neither the cancer patients nor their doctors were allowed to testify.”

— Barry Lynes

“Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public, not designers or clients. 'Do no harm' is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.”

— Milton Glaser

“I do believe that, in time, doctors - both alternative and orthodox - will begin using whatever is the highest best treatment for their patients, regardless of the modality.”

— Brandon Bays

“The main thing is that people see constant reports of break-ins on, on record systems and stolen financial data and social security records and so they'd think about you know what's going to prevent that happening with my medical records. And interestingly enough, patients are less worried about that than their doctors are.”

— William Davis

“A number of holistic and complementary medical doctors in the US, from general practitioners to psychiatrists, are using maca with a variety of patients. Both men and women report a significant boost in libido. And a number of men who have suffered from erectile dysfunction have improved, as a result of taking maca.”

— Chris Kilham

“Mental illness is a real thing. It has real material consequences for people who suffer from it and at the time even the most biological finding reflects social context in very important ways, and so I think psychiatry is better off looking both at biology and at social context and really trying to think of the relationship between these and I think doctors and patients are better off that way.”

— Jonathan Michel Metzl

“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it's like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren't equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can't live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”

— Ronald Reagan

“Doctors should recognise the importance of the five human values; Truth, righteousness, Peace, Love and Non-violence. Love is the basis for all the other values. Doctors can infuse courage in patients by the love they show towards the patients. If doctors carry out their duties with love they will be crowned with success.”

— Sathya Sai Baba

“Occasionally I talk with people who see doctors as people who do nothing but give of themselves and never receive from anyone else - especially not from their patients. That is totally
false. The longer I remain in my profession, the more I realize how much I receive from those who come to me for help.”

— Benjamin Carson

“Medicines cure diseases, but only doctors can cure patients.”

— Carl Jung

“An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.”

— William James