Medical Patients Quotes & Sayings

Time was when medicine could do very little for critically ill or dying patients. Now it can do too much. Where to draw the line is the subject of a broad, heated debate throughout the country, a debate that becomes louder with each new medical miracle or impossible case ... — Lisa Belkin

The current lack of a national standard for operators of medical imaging and radiation therapy equipment poses a hazard to American patients and jeopardizes quality health care. — Charles W. Pickering

When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said ...
Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant.
If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing
(University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube) — Gary Taubes

I don't doubt for a moment that the revolution will result in a nonracial society. I have just come from being a patient in Groote Schuur Hospital where they now have integrated wards. For the first time in my life, I have seen it working. The patients were mixed, the staff was mixed, and the medical officers were mixed; it was totally integrated. It was beautiful. White and black together. And it works. To me that is terribly exciting. — Helen Joseph

At that time there were no written guidelines stating that doctors should not treat members of their families or themselves. Doctors routinely wrote prescriptions in their own names to replenish medications used in their medical bags for immediate treatment of patients. After legitimate causes were established for the "special cases," they were both dropped before being debated by the board. — George Nichopoulos

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. — Andrew Lansley

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. — Theodore Dalrymple

Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer. — Richard J. Roberts

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley, — Nathaniel Philbrick

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

The ideal of free medical services collided against the reality of human behaviour, certainly in Singapore. My first lesson came from government clinics and hospitals. When doctors prescribed free antibiotics, patients took their tablet or capsules for two days, did not feel better, and threw away the balance. They then consulted private doctors, paid for their antibiotics, completed the course, and recovered. — William A. Haseltine

People seemed to have two different selves - an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients' overall pain ratings even after they'd experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. "That wasn't so terrible," they'd reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically. — Atul Gawande

Ancient traditions have long associated holy wells and springs as very special places of the Goddess or anima mundi: symbolic of the Great Mother and associated with birth, the feminine principle, the universal womb, the prima materia, the waters of fertility and refreshment and the fountain of life. The dreaming sites, as they are called, have also been associated with visions, healing, and other paranormal experiences. In ancient Greece, for example, there were more than three-hundred medical centers placed at water sources, where patients experienced healing. — Christopher McDowell

We'd come to the same fork in the road I have seen scores of patients come to, the same place I'd seen Alice Hobson come to. We were up against the unfixable. But we were desperate to believe that we weren't up against the unmanageable. Yet short of calling 911 the next time trouble hit, and letting the logic and momentum of medical solutions take over, what were we to do? Between the three of us we had 120 years of experience in medicine, but it seemed a mystery. It turned out to be an education. — Atul Gawande

Participatory Medicine is a model of cooperative health care that seeks to achieve active involvement by patients, professionals, caregivers, and others across the continuum of care on all issues related to an individual's health. Participatory medicine is an ethical approach to care that also holds promise to improve outcomes, reduce medical errors, increase patient satisfaction and improve the cost of care. — Bertalan Mesko

After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before the 'cure'? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just have the healer's or the patient's say-so? He uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in America of 'psychic surgery'. But he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child's spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to a faith-healer and she's dead in a day. — Carl Sagan

physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET — T. Colin Campbell

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market. — Pauline Hanson

Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed. — Hippocrates

Many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. "It's ironic," she told me. "The Moore court's concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired - it just handed that commercial value to researchers." According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn't prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery. — Rebecca Skloot

In the mid-1950s, when I was in medical school, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between our neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders. — Oliver Sacks

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body: The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. — Robert Wachter

As a clinician, I unapologetically believe that we must no longer identify our patients/clients with the addiction. While they may struggle with an addiction, the addiction itself is no different than any other form of medical ailment and disease. — Asa Don Brown

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

EMTs learned to love brave patients
they weren't nearly such a pain in the ass as the whiners
but not to trust them. In the name of courage, they would hide symptoms, not ask for help when there was help hovering around them anxious to give them succor ... — Nevada Barr

Patients with delirium were almost always on medical or surgical wards, not on neurological or psychiatric wards, for delirium generally indicates a medical problem, a consequence of something affecting the whole body, including the brain, and it disappears as soon as the medical problem has been righted. — Oliver Sacks

Today, hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients are under medical treatment, which is a great advancement. But it makes some people reckless. — Yoweri Museveni

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of. — Walker Percy

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death. — Jack Kevorkian

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed. — Jon Porter

This skewing of physicians' thinking leads to poor care. What is remarkable is not merely the consequences of a doctor's negative emotions. Despite research showing that most patients pickup on the physician's negativity, few of them understand its effect on their medical care and rarely change doctors because of it. — Jerome Groopman

We have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients. — Ellen Goodman

What is odd, perhaps, is how the primacy of patient autonomy and informed consent over efficacy - which is what we're talking about here - was presumed, but not actively discussed within the medical profession. Although the authoritative and paternalistic reassurance of the Victorian doctor who 'blinds with science' is a thing of the past in medicine, the success of the alternative therapy movement - whose practitioners mislead, mystify and blind their patients with sciencey-sounding 'authoritative' explanations, like the most patronising Victorian doctor imaginable - suggests that there may still be a market for that kind of approach. — Ben Goldacre

One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients. — Eula Biss

One study concluded that there were 1.7 errors per patient per day in America's ICUs. Of these errors, 29 percent could have caused clinically significant harm or death. Given that the average ICU length of stay is three days, this research suggests that nearly all patients hospitalized in the ICU sustain a potentially life-threatening mistake at some point during their stay. — Peter Pronovost

Thank you! It's really cool to have a boyfriend who's a medical student."
Gideon grinned. "I swear that's the last time I ever vaccinate anyone. Patients are so ungrateful. — Kerstin Gier

In 1975, the respected British medical journal Lancet reported on a study which compared the effect on cancer patients of (1) a single chemotherapy, (2) multiple chemotherapy, and (3) no treatment at all. No treatment 'proved a significantly better policy for patients' survival and for quality of remaining life.' — Barry Lynes

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian.

In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids. — Jennifer L. Pozner

As a physician I have sympathy for patients suffering from pain and other medical conditions. Although I understand many believe marijuana is the most effective drug in combating their medical ailments, I would caution against this assumption due to the lack of consistent, repeatable scientific data available to prove marijuana's benefits. Based on current evidence, I believe that marijuana is a dangerous drug and that there are less dangerous medicines offering the same relief from pain and other medical symptoms. — Bill Frist

When ill, the patient assumes what Parsons called "the sick-role". Accordingly, the sick person is, on the one hand, excused his or her social responsabilites, but, on the other hand, is expected to desire a return to health and to comply unquestioningly with the directives of medical experts in order to achieve this goal — Mary Lindemann

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan. — Atul Gawande

We see it in attempts on Capitol Hill to impose gag rules on rules on doctors on what they can say to their patients about family planning. And we certainly see it now with an effort by the government to tap our phones; invade our medical records, credit information, library records and the most sensitive personal information in the name of national security. — Dick Durbin

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory. — James Rothman

I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with. — Hugh Laurie

Reiki has become a sought-after healing art among patients and mainstream medical professionals. — Mehmet Oz

Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker. — David Mixner

And for a personal health record to be truly transformative, it will need to be far more than a passive window into the medical record, with a scheduling and medication refill module tacked on. It will have to be dynamic, engaging, and capable of interacting with patients and families in ways that ultimately lead to better health. While Google and Microsoft were trying to find ways to give patients direct access to their records via the Web, others have focused on what might seem to be an easier problem: sharing records between — Robert Wachter

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome. — Tom Brokaw

Reject the phony Patients' Bill of Rights ... We don't have to continue down the path of socialized medical care, especially in America where free markets have provided so much for so many. — Ron Paul

Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer's patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn't matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery. — James Bovard

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

My father's concern for his patients was only enhanced by the fact that so many of them had a personal connection to him...In the words of the historian David J. Rothman, 'doctor and patient occupied the same social space,' promoting a shared relationship. Meanwhile, the poor and minority patients my dad met for the first time at the Mount Sinai--including many he would then follow for years--got the same royal treatment...His goal was to 'take extra pains with the service patients, to be certain they are reassured and confident in your care, and come to believe that you really care about him or her as an individual.' One way he did this was to take advantage of his flexible schedule. 'It's so simple,' he wrote, 'to make an extra visit in the afternoon for these special cases, come back to report a new lab test result, review an X-ray [or] reassure that the scheduled test is necessary, important and will lead to some conclusive information.' Illness, he underscored, was 'frightening. — Barron H. Lerner

Researches tested a new form of medical marijuana that treats pain but doesn't get the user high, prompting patients who need medical marijuana to declare, 'Thank you?' — Jimmy Fallon

I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race. — J.G. Ballard

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy] — Robert Moore

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians. — Ramakrishna

Nurses serve their patients in the most important capacities. We know that they serve as our first lines of communication when something goes wrong or when we are concerned about health. — Lois Capps

The mind controls so much of the body. We are much more than flesh and blood; we are complex systems. Patients do better when they have faith that they're going to do better. That's why I always tell my patients and their families not to neglect their prayers. There's nobody I don't say that to. — Ben Carson

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all. — William Osler

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story. — Shannon L. Alder

When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union's interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear of the superficial swirl of political maneuvering, but never misses any opportunity to improve the capability of the A-bomb Hospital or to enhance concretely the welfare of the patients. In that sense, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'dirty handkerchief.' That is, he serves to filter political purposes out of relief efforts so that the effect on patients is purely and concretely humane. — Kenzaburo Oe

I do not practice clinical medicine and hence do not treat individual patients. My career is in medical science. — Robert Jarvik

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, "You let me know when you want to stop." All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time - just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come - and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want. — Atul Gawande

It is [Simon] Wessely's often-unconcealed "derision" directed towards people with ME -- a disease from which people die and which appears on Coroners' death certificates as the cause of death -- which arouses such anger, an anger that is not confined to patients in the UK but encompasses medical scientists in other countries whose decision-makers have come under Wessely's thrall. — Michael Hanlon

There's no reason that patients can't have electronic access to their complete medical history ... Just as people can check their bank account information online or using their ATM card, patients who want to should have electronic access to their medical records ... — Paul Ryan

At the age of 16, my father's father dropped dead of a heart attack. And I think it changed the course of his life, and he became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients. — Sally Mann

I think that the marriage of academic medical centers and academicians with the private sector is a very, is a marriage made in heaven because it's the best way to get basic discoveries from the laboratory into new therapeutics for our patients. — Laurie Glimcher

Town designers are responsible for the total life of the town far more surely than doctors are responsible for the individual lives of their patients--for much medical history is act of God, whereas almost all town planning history is, alas, act of man. And compared with this all the professional squabbles, all the statistics, all the traffic flow, all the architectural fads, do not matter a damn. — Ian Nairn

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous. — Alice Dreger

Josh's father felt Josh should bond with his fellow injured patients in the ward. This was something I really dissuaded Josh from doing. I didn't want him to hear the hardships, battles, and frustrations that others were going through. I also didn't want Josh to take on their fears and frustrations. We were always pleasant and polite to everyone else in the ward, but my only concern was Josh, and it was enough for us to focus just on his issues. I found the whole Acute Spinal Ward experience extremely negative and distressingly sad with no great healing or recovery objective. The message from the medical team was always, without fail, acceptance of the prognosis. This was totally the opposite message of what we presented and instilled into Josh. We slowly gained evidence that our non-traditional approach was working. — Josh Wood

Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of is patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed. — Michael Crichton

Several years ago, I realized that I didn't want to spend all my life in medicine. It had me in a sort of spiritual box, like a plant whose roots are getting crowded. I felt I wasn't growing. So I promised myself that I would quit while I still had the energy to get involved in something new. There's nothing wrong with medicine. There's more paperwork, more lawsuits, less understanding between doctors and patients. But it's still a great business. But not for me - not any longer. — Richard S. Weeder

Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician. — Hippocrates

Patient autonomy is paramount to the oath that we take when we enter the profession of medicine. That is why I am appalled when the federal government gets between my patients and their right to the full range of medical information and complete access to health care. — Ami Bera

There are, Jefferson said, two classes of "disputants" that are especially common. The "first is . . . young students . . . the other consists of the ill-tempered & rude men in society, who have taken up a passion for politics." From both, Jefferson urged, "keep aloof, as you would from the infected subjects of yellow fever or pestilence. Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. — Davidson Butler

For me, the ability to use semiconductor sequencing to provide a medical diagnosis in just a few hours that once took days is a crucial step in saving the lives of patients. This is particularly significant for the treatment of sepsis, where every minute matters. — Chris Toumazou

We are glad to tie up with a humanitarian organization, which is being promoted by Prince Abdul Aziz. This partnership will greatly help in assisting needy renal-failure patients by supplying them equipment, medicines and other medical supplies, while encouraging and supporting scientific research. — Sulaiman Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi

Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families. — Caitlin Doughty

Big Pharma needs sick people to prosper. Patients, not healthy people, are their customers. If everybody was cured of a particular illness or disease, pharmaceutical companies would lose 100% of their profits on the products they sell for that ailment. What all this means is because modern medicine is so heavily intertwined with the financial profits culture, it's a sickness industry more than it is a health industry. — James Morcan

Another common practice, the reps told us, was to take fancy meals to the entire doctor's office (one of the perks of being a nurse or receptionist, I suppose). One doctor's office even required alternating days of steak and lobster for lunch if the reps wanted access to the doctors. Even more shocking, we found out that physicians sometimes called the reps into the examination room (as an "expert") to directly inform patients about the way certain drugs work. Hearing stories from the reps who sold medical devices was even more disturbing. We learned that it's common practice for device reps to peddle their medical devices in the operating room in real time and while a surgery is under way. Janet and I were surprised at how well the pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. — Dan Ariely

I would like the Medical Society to be one of the resources for information about the influences that have an impact on our patients and our practices. — Samuel Wilson

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society. — Ben Carson

Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on "vibratory massage" and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of "a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum" he was "able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions." Indeedy. Shropshire's patients returned every other day for treatment, no doubt also developing a relationship with the vibration machine. — Mary Roach

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. — Lewis Thomas

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

One of the reasons why I, 'a medical man' decided to give up medicine was a firm conviction of the extraordinary influence on health of pleasurable excitement, especially when combined with fresh air and exercise. How frequently have I, with great difficulty, persuaded patients who were never off my doorsteps to take up golf, and how rarely, if ever, I have seen them in my consulting room again. — Alister MacKenzie

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

In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients' "ease" but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonguing and even magnifying patients' dis-ease. — Jack Kevorkian

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine. — Abraham Verghese

I've been focused on detecting nuclear terrorism at ports, in cargo containers, and I developed and built detectors that are extremely cheap and also very sensitive. My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer. — Taylor Wilson

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. — Herbert M. Shelton

This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. — Ezekiel Emanuel

Preliminary research-most of it published outside the medical literature-indicates that a significant number of our patients have experienced some form of violence and abuse during their lifetime, including elder abuse, child abuse, gang-related violence, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. — David Schneider

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options. — Thomas R. Insel

And under the new guidelines issued by the Obama Administration, Federal agents will not pursue pot-smoking patients in states that allow medical marijuana. This new policy is called 'Don't Ask, Don't
What Was I Talking About?' — Jay Leno

Many of us are alarmed at the skyrocketing cost of medical care, including patients, who are the consumers. However, medical malpractice is not the reason for these increasing costs. — Joe Baca

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there. — Paul Bloom

We have a duty to ensure that patients don't have to worry whether they'll be dropped from their coverage if they get sick. Small business owners shouldn't have to break the bank to provide coverage to their employees. And families should not be forced into bankruptcy because of a medical crisis. — Jeff Merkley