Patient Experience Quotes & Sayings

Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate. — Hippocrates

Think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping. — Mary Oliver

Never underestimate the power of kindness. It is very contagious. A person whose heart is saddened by the troubles of this world, the loss of a friend or family member, a hard days work, or the struggle of provision can experience joy through a simple act of kindness. Romans 12: 10-12, Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another, not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continually steadfastly in prayer. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

But science and experience reveal that with self-reflection and understanding, non-ideal patterns we've adopted from our own pasts can be transformed. Be patient with yourself and with your family members. With kindness and understanding, to yourself and to others, change can be nurtured and good things can emerge. — Daniel J. Siegel

I'll never forget reading Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end - the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him - and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon's top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let's just hope market forces don't send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate. — Adam Ross

The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition. — Terry Eagleton

When a patient says he feels stuck and confused, and through good intentions he struggles to become loose and clear, he only remains chronically trapped in the mire of his own stubbornness. If instead he will go with where he is, only then is there hope. If he will let himself get deeply into the experience of being stuck, only then will he reclaim that part of himself that is holding him. Only if he will give up trying to control his thinking, and let himself sink into his confusion, only then will things become clear. (64) — Sheldon B. Kopp

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on. — Lois McMaster Bujold

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. — Jean H. Baker

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis. — Philip K. Dick

The medical clown connects with patients in a way that is markedly different from the rest of their experience in the hospital. — Jeff Raz

In my experience, men who respond to good fortune with modesty and kindness are harder to find than those who face adversity with courage. For in the very nature of things, success tends to create pride and blindness in the hearts of men, while suffering teaches them to be patient and strong. — Xenophon

The brand of the future ... is patient, consistent, connected, and trusted. The new brand is based on the truth that only comes from experiencing the product, not just yelling about it. Word of mouth is more important (by a factor of 20) than TV advertising, and the remarkability word of mouth demands comes from what we experience, not from spin or taglines or a campaign slogan. — Seth Godin

The DID patient is a single person who experiences himself or herself as having separate alternate identities that have relative psychological autonomy from one another. At various times, these subjective identities may take executive control of the person's body and behavior and/or influence his or her experience and behavior from "within." Taken together, all of the alternate identities make up the identity or personality of the human being with DID.

- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p7 — James A. Chu

Nursing demands vigilance about people. The sights and smells that a patient offers, their movements and their offhand comments all contribute crucial information to understanding what they need. Training and experience heighten one's ability to see what needs to be seen. — Steven Amsterdam

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. — Lawrence Durrell

William gave the gallerist a grim look. In my experience, he said, crooks are usually the least dishonest of the bunch. It's not in their interest to deceive you, sir. This is how they make their living. Be patient. — Steven Price

No beating yourself up. That's not allowed. Be patient with yourself. It took you years to form the bad habits of thought that you no longer want. It will take a little
time to form new and better ones. But I promise you this: Even a slight move in this direction will bring you some peace. The more effort you apply to it, the faster you'll find your bliss, but you'll experience rewards immediately. — Holly Mosier

I'll never forget the crippling headaches Grandpa suffered, the nausea from chemo and radiation. I watched Daddy wrestle with decision after decision, ultimately withholding IV antibiotics to treat the pneumonia that took Grandpa more quickly and far more gently. Barrons is voicing the legitimate question of anyone who's ever agreed not to resuscitate, to cease life-sustaining measures for a loved one, to accept a Stage 4 cancer patient's decision to refuse more chemo, or euthanize a beloved pet. Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one's presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they're gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don't know how to walk or breathe when they're no longer there. And how could you? Your world revolved around them. — Karen Marie Moning

I think it perfectly just, that he who, from the love of experiment, quits an approved for an uncertain practice, should suffer the full penalty of Egyptian law against medical innovation; as I would consign to the pillory, the wretch, who out of regard to his character, that is, to his fees, should follow the routine, when, from constant experience he is sure that his patient will die under it, provided any, not inhuman, deviation would give his patient a chance. — Thomas Beddoes

When we see, we do so many things: we experience what is happening in a direct way; we discover something we never noticed or possibly never even looked for before; we become aware through a series of visual experiences of something we eventually come to recognize and know; we watch for evolving changes through patient observation. — Donis A. Dondis

Even when the [schizophrenic] patient is striving to tell us, in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours, the speech content is necessarily difficult to follow. Moreover, the formal elements of speech are in themselves ordered in unusual ways, and these formal peculiarities seem, at least to some extent, to be the reflection in language of the alternative ordering of his experience, with splits in it where we take coherence for granted, and the running together (confusion) of elements that we keep apart. — R.D. Laing

Don't become weary in doing good. If we are patient, we can experience the change of heart we seek. For most of us this will require only a slight change of course, sending us toward the time north. The adjustments we must make are those 'small things', but that does not mean they are easy. Too many forces are confusing our compass. But the pull to the polar star is one we recognize. It is the direction toward home. — Kathleen H. Hughes

In daily life we experience suffering more often than pleasure. If we are patient, in the sense of taking suffering voluntarily upon ourselves, even if we are not capable of doing this physically, then we will not lose our capacity for judgement. We should remember that if a situation cannot be changed, there is no point in worrying about it. If it can be changed, then there is no need to worry about it either, we should simply go about changing it. — Dalai Lama XIV

In my experience with EEG Biofeedback and ADD, many people are able to improve their reading skills and decrease their need for medication. Also, EEG biofeedback has helped to decrease impulsivity and aggressiveness. It is a powerful tool, in part, because the patient becomes part of the treatment process by taking more control over his own physiological processes. — Daniel Amen

And here it is that the teaching is needed: If you would enter into full fellowship with Christ in His death,and know the full deliverance from self, humble yourself. This is your duty. Place yourself before God in your helplessness; consent to the fact that you are powerless to slay yourself; give yourself in patient and trustful surrender to God. Accept every humiliation; look upon every person who tries or troubles you as a means of grace to humble you. God will see such acceptance as proof that your whole heart desires it. It is the path of humility that leads to the full and perfect experience of our death with Christ. Beware of the mistake so many make. They have so many qualifications and limitations, so many thoughts and questions as to what true humility is to be and to do that they never unreservedly yield themselves to it. Humble yourself unto death. It is in the death to self that humility is perfected. — Andrew Murray

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past. — Sigmund Freud

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation. — Svetlana Alexievich

I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother. — Alice Miller

Dive from a high platform, walk a country lane, watch your computer freeze, cross a finish line, hear your morning alarm, look for a parking space, toast on your anniversary, embrace a friend after a funeral. As you live your life, what do you feel? Terror, serenity, frustration, relief, groaning reluctance, patient endurance, pride, satisfaction, or a grief made bearable because somehow life will go on. We experience life as feelings. — Donald Maass

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever
or not? — Elizabeth Gilbert

Yes, movies! Look at them - All of those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves - Goody, goody! - It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island - to make a safari - to be exotic, far-off! - But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move! — Tennessee Williams

Freud put it beautifully: the aim of psychoanalysis is to help the patient let go of the delusional suffering of his neuroses and experience the misery of actual reality. — Tim Farrington

I feel that I have a certain amount of experience and I'm still learning so much. But a director's job is so vast; they have so much to do with the preparation. You have to be great with all kinds of personalities and you have to be very patient, there's a lot of skills I'm not sure if I have. So I don't know if I'm ready to direct, but who knows what the future has. — Jason Statham

The longer the waiting, the longer the wondering. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Despite education and knowledge and experience, when you are the patient
suffering, confused, and despairing
it is very, very hard to take matters into your own hands. I was not a George Griffin, able to stand alone and challenge the prevailing assumptions. I needed an external voice, strong and determined, to guide me. — Jerome Groopman

It's important to treat each patient the best way, every day, patient satisfaction and experience must be a priority. From the moment they check in, to the moment they check out, friendly faces will calm them down. — Bob Mangat

In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:
"There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and - no time to think - out you go.
"You descend. You hit the ground ... But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to? ... No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?
"The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me. — John Corey Whaley

The patient needs an experience, not an explanation. — Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. — Jennifer Worth

Patients with complex trauma may at times develop extreme reactions to something the therapist has said or not said, done or not done. It is wise to anticipate this in advance, and perhaps to note this anticipation in initial communications with the patient. For example, one may say something like, "It is likely in our work together, there will be a time or times when you will feel angry with me, disappointed with me, or that I have failed you. We should except this and not be surprised if and when it happens, which it probably will." It is also vital to emphasize to the patient that despite the diagnosis and experience of dividedness, the whole person is responsible and will be held responsible for the acts of any part. p174 — Elizabeth F. Howell

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

Michelle shrugged off Sam's aggression. Her eyes misted with memories. "Our curveball was a brain tumor. A grade IV astrocytoma, to be specific. He tried all the treatments - chemo, radiation, even surgery. Nothing helped alleviate his symptoms or his suffering. He was dying in the most horrible way. Seizures, nausea, blinding headaches, memory loss like an Alzheimer's patient. I didn't know what it was like to watch someone I love suffer so much, but I can relate to Julie's pain because the experience was utterly excruciating. — Daniel Palmer

You can often help others more by correcting your own faults than theirs. Remember, and you should, because of your own experience, that allowing God to correct your faults is not easy. Be patient with people, wait for God to work with them as He wills. — Francois Fenelon

That is, whether or not an act is considered deviant depends upon how it is labeled (defined) by other people. For example, in a well-known study of jazz musicians, Becker (1963) found marijuana use to be considered normal by the musicians, but labeled as illegal, deviant behavior by the larger society, and subject to sanctions like arrest, fines, and jail terms. Although labeling theory pertained to deviance generally, several studies focused on the mental patient experience in which persons once treated for mental illness found it difficult to shed the label of "former mental patient" even if the experience was in the past and the person supposedly cured (Scheff [1966] 1999). — William C. Cockerham

Smart good hunters are always patient — Sameh Elsayed

Hospitals have missed the point that the best way to improve the patient experience is to build better engagement with their employees, who will then provide better service and health care to patients. — Paul Spiegelman

It is pure mythology that women cannot perform as well as men in science, engineering and mathematics. In my experience, the opposite is true: Women are often more adept and patient at untangling complex problems, multitasking, seeing the possibilities in new solutions and winning team support for collaborative action. — Weili Dai

Experience has taught me that the Shepherd is far more willing to show His sheep the path than the sheep are to follow. He is endlessly merciful, patient, tender, and loving. If we, His stupid and wayward sheep, really want to be led, we will without fail be led. Of that I am sure. — Elisabeth Elliot

Patience lives in the gap between our experience of an event and our response to that experience. — Allan Lokos

Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compatibilities and tastes; on a respect for measurement, balance, chemistry and heat; on a history of countless errors overcome. — Julia Glass

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. — Eugene H. Peterson

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified. — Jack Kevorkian

But ... but what if I hit you?"
A snort. "You're not going to hit me."
"How do you know?" I bristled at his amused tone. "I could hit you. Even master swordsmen make mistakes. I could get a lucky shot, or you might not see me coming. I don't want to hurt you."
He favored me with another patient look. "And how much experience do you have with swords and weapons in general?"
"Um." I glanced down at the saber in my hand. "Thirty seconds?"
He smiled, that calm, irritatingly confident smirk. "You're not going to hit me. — Julie Kagawa

The first [quality] to be named must always be the power of attention, of giving one's whole mind to the patient without the interposition of anything of oneself. It sounds simple but only the very greatest doctors ever fully attain it ... The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that small quiet monitor? But intuition is only interference from experience stored and not actively recalled ... The last aptitude I shall mention that must be attained by the good physician is that of handling the sick man's mind. — Wilfred Trotter

The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it. — Augustus Y. Napier

if he will watch, control, and alter his thoughts, tracing their effects upon himself, upon others, and upon his life and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation, and utilizing his every experience, even to the most trivial, everyday occurrence, as a means of obtaining that knowledge of himself which is Understanding, Wisdom, Power. In — James Allen

People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor's office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor, you the patient. Doctor doesn't cease being doctor at close of day. Neither should patient. People expect doctor to go about things with the utmost seriousness, skill and experience. But what about patient? How professional is he? — Don DeLillo

This process of being mature in an anxious organisation has been likened to learning to sail against the wind; and as any sailor will tell you, this requires concentration and tolerating some tension as the wind pressures the vessel to let it take over the controls. Good skippers know how to tolerate sufficient tension to keep a steady course. They don't try to overpower their vessel with too much sail in order to get to the finish line faster, as they know this will inevitably knock them backwards. They also know not to panic and retreat to the safe harbour of familiarity. They focus on their key tasks of setting the course and letting the crew know their intensions so that each person can get on with focusing on their own tasks. There's only one path to growing this ability: through patient, thoughtful perseverance in the midst of experience ... no short cuts to be found. — Jenny Brown

Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. — Carl Jung

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience ... . — Mark Epstein

I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty. — Walter Lippmann

I urge you children to be patient with your parents. If they seem to be out of touch on such vital issues as dating, clothing styles, modern music, and use of family cars, listen to them anyway. They have the experience that you lack. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

The reality of the dying person is very different from that of the living. She is experiencing we cannot fully understand or enter into. If a person is conscious and able to talk, I always listen and take my cues from him. The desires of the dying, however nonsensical or puzzling they may be, are met. If the patient talks about the past, or about people long dead, I assume she is experiencing things we in the room are unaware of. I never discount that reality. If the person is unconscious, I speak as if he is able to hear and understand. If words from loved ones are forthcoming, it is again important to assume that the patient hears and understands what is being said. The most important thing to remember is that the experience is about the dying person, not the survivors. — Megory Anderson