Quotes & Sayings About Patients

I have had a number of patients with breast cancer, all of whom had root canals on the tooth related to the breast area on the associated energy meridian. — John Diamond

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

Many of our patients are barely aware of their breath, so learning to focus on the in and out breath, to notice whether the breath was fast or slow, and to count breaths in some poses can be a significant accomplishment.13 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

A farmer's work is more like that of a horse trainer than a mechanic, more like that of a healer than a computer repairperson. It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant's or an animal's innate ability to do its own growing -- in the same way that the best horse trainers seek to draw out abilities already within their horses or in the way the best healers know when to stand back and let their patients' bodies do the work. There is mystery in farming. — Ben Hartman

Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living. Also, the support that patients give each other is a powerful motivator. — Dean Ornish

I've turned down a lot of proposed scripts for Scrubs episodes, mainly ones with AIDs patients. It sickens me, really. If you don't want AIDs, don't be a ice cream man. Or African. I'm neither and I'm fine. — Zach Braff

Many patients may confess that they feel "strange" or "confused" during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware of something the matter in addition to the scintillating scotoma, paraesthesiae, etc., something so unprecedented in their experience, so difficult to describe, that it is often avoided or omitted when speaking of their complaints. Great — Oliver Sacks

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

Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning. — Nellie Bly

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

This is usually accomplished by taking X-rays of the affected joints and analyzing blood for an ANA and rheumatoid factor (RF). Unfortunately, Lyme disease can cause false positive ANAs and rheumatoid factors due to a patient's overstimulated immune system. This can lead to a mistaken diagnosis of lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. This is why drawing a CCP (cyclic citrullinated peptide) is so important. It is a specific marker for rheumatoid arthritis and will help determine whether the patient has true rheumatoid arthritis or not. Patients with a positive ANA or RF often are prescribed immunosuppressive drugs, such as steroids or immunomodulatory drugs, like Enbrel or Arava. These treatments can have dire consequences for the Lyme disease patient who is co-infected, since they are already immune-suppressed, and steroids can cause their underlying infections and subsequent manifestations — Richard I. Horowitz

Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. — Julian Barnes

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever - stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave. — Jeffrey Kluger

Now, as Global Ambassador for Starlight Children's Foundation, which brightens the lives of poorly children, I visit hospitals and tell stories to the young patients. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I draw. — Tony DiTerlizzi

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

The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place. — Robert W. Welch Jr.

The newspapers recommended preparations which hastened the growth of the beard, and twenty-four- and twenty-five-year-old doctors, who had just finished their examinations, wore mighty beards and gold spectacles even if their eyes did not need them, so that they could make an impression of "experience" upon their first patients. — Stefan Zweig

I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes.' (135) — Sheldon B. Kopp

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

You wouldn't believe how many FDA officials or relatives or acquaintances of FDA officials come to see me as patients in Hanover. You wouldn't believe this, or directors of the AMA, or ACA, or the presidents of orthodox cancer institutes. That's the fact — Hans Alfred Nieper

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

There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures. — Steven Klein

Because of the war on drugs, pain patients are treated with skepticism and pain doctors live in fear of being prosecuted for overprescribing. The end result is that addicts still get their opioids without much trouble, while genuine patients often can't find treatment. Those who do must typically be tracked in a database and must schedule frequent, expensive doctor visits for surveillance like urine testing. — Maia Szalavitz

I prefer rock music - my favorites are R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet - but I think that if Dr. Buckley played Matthew Sweet, some of her patients would not like it. Matthew Sweet has a song called "Sick of Myself," and I am pretty sure that is exactly the wrong song name for a therapist's waiting room. — Craig Lancaster

The system is broken. The doctors and the nurses can't do everything. The patients need human attention; the patients themselves need to be addressed, rather than just their disease. — Colleen Saidman

The overarching goal of occupation therapy is simple: Help patients live life to the fullest. — Holly Goodman

Throughout my career, as both a physician and a scientist, I have drawn inspiration from Merck's unwavering commitment to scientific excellence. Over time, this commitment has brought forth an unparalleled number of breakthrough medicines and vaccines that improve the lives of patients around the world. — Roger M. Perlmutter

When I'm reasonably balanced in my personal and spiritual life, I don't have difficulty finding compassion for my addicted patients. — Gabor Mate

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. — Wally Lamb

The Patients' Bill of Rights is necessary to guarantee that health care will be available for those who are paying for insurance. It's a part of the overall health care picture. — Debbie Stabenow

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients. — Irving Kirsch

Patients and clients are sometimes hard to be understood! — Deyth Banger

Opaque and invisible models are the rule, and clear ones very much the exception. We're modeled as shoppers and couch potatoes, as patients and loan applicants, and very little of this do we see - even in applications we happily sign up for. Even when such models behave themselves, opacity can lead to a feeling of unfairness. — Cathy O'Neil

Standing on the edge with my patients - abiding with them - means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could. — Christine Montross

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

Migraine attacks are often preceded by visual disturbances, weakness, dizziness, ringing in the ears, and other symptoms. Many patients report that they can avert a migraine attack by smoking a joint at the first warning of onset. Others take a small dosage daily to ward off attacks. Patients say inhaled marijuana is preferable to oral preparations such as Marinol in such situations, because quick treatment is necessary. (There is no evidence that CBD or other non-THC cannabinoids are helpful against migraines.) — Dale Gieringer

Sometimes in the late evenings one walks busily up and down the ward doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks - bed-making, washing, one errand and another - and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon behind a crooked tree.
The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind. — Enid Bagnold

Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees. — Nelson DeMille

According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in "crude psychiatric analysis," guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and "incestuous opinion citing," these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making "therapeutic lifers" out of their patients and ripping families apart. This — Elizabeth F. Loftus

People and organizations other than doctors increasingly are assuming power to decide which medications to prescribe or procedures to undertake. More and more, decisions about personal healthcare are no longer made by the treating physicians in consultation with their patients, and based on the doctors' expertise. — Bob Barr

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

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

I sometimes wonder why I have spent more than fifty years in New York, when it was the West, and especially the Southwest, which so enthralled me. I now have many ties in New York - to my patients, my students, my friends, and my analyst - but I have never felt it move me the way California did. I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, "The future is before me. — Oliver Sacks

Sure," I said. "But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that?" He turned back and, smiling sweetly, said, "Fuck you." Then, in a stentorian voice, he corrected himself: "No. I would say, 'The objective is to inculcate in the doctors and nurses the spirit to dedicate themselves to the patients, and especially to having an outcome-oriented view of TB.' " He was grinning, his face alight. He looked very young just then. "In other words, 'Fuck you. — Tracy Kidder

If you eliminate wheat from your diet, you're no longer hungry between meals because you've cut out the appetite stimulant, and consequently you lose weight very quickly. I've seen this with thousands of patients. — William Davis

Getting to know patients is what I do. I learn about their deepest fears and secrets. A professional relationship becomes a personal one. It can be no other way. (190) — Michael Robotham

No one I met at this time
doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients
failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all. — George Orwell

At six months, 36 percent of patients reported new-onset fatigue, 20 percent reported widespread pain, and 45 percent reported neurocognitive difficulties. — Pamela Weintraub

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

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street. — Irvin D. Yalom

Managers of hospitals over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service, and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served. — Jo Brand

You're right. Many nurses nowadays don't like doing the things that nurses used to have to do. Changing sheets and collecting bedpans - that sort of thing. Nursing has moved on, Bertie.'
Bertie was puzzled. 'But if they don't do that,' he said, 'then who does? Do people have to tuck themselves into bed when they're in hospital?'
Irene was amused by this and raised her eyes again. 'Dear Bertie, no, not at all. They have other people now to do that sort of thing. There are other wome ... people who do that.' 'So they aren't nurses, Mummy?' asked Bertie. Irene waved a hand vaguely. 'No. They call them care assistants, or something like that. It's very important work.' 'So what do the nurses do then, Mummy? If they have somebody else to take the bedpans to the patients, what's left for the nurses to do? Do they do the things that doctors do? Can nurses take your tonsils out?' 'I think they'd like to,' said Irene. — Alexander McCall Smith

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life ... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs. — Ezekiel Emanuel

Residents of my district continue to stress to me that they want health care decisions to be made by patients and doctors, not by the government and insurance companies. — Tim Walberg

Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, chorea, or dystonia. — Oliver Sacks

Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. — Ronald Reagan

Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor. — Simon Singh

Southam's research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who'd injected children with hepatitis and others who'd poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam's study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists' fears, the ethical crackdown didn't slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. — Rebecca Skloot

The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. — Andrew Davidson

Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born ... And thus is the race kept free from vitiation. — Herbert Spencer

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis. — C. G. Jung

Once I Knew A Lovely Psychiatrist.
I Always Thought She Had The Worst Patients.

P. Hermans — Petra Hermans

Revolutionary ideas may be wonderful, but revolutions are nasty. You can't cure a headache by cutting off the patients head. — Joel Shepherd

PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines - elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of the attack, and states of euphoric rebound. Any or all of these may be abstracted as isolated periodic symptoms of relatively short duration - some hours, or at most two or three days, and as such may present themselves as primary emotional disorders. The most acute of these mood-changes, generally no more than an hour in duration, usually represents concomitants or equivalents of migraine aura. We may confine our attention at this stage to attacks of depression, or truncated manic-depressive cycles, occurring at intervals in patients who have previously suffered from attacks of undoubted (classical, common, abdominal, etc.) migraine. — Oliver Sacks

Using this novel method, doctors could treat female patients without violating the honor of her family. — Jack Weatherford

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse. — Mary Roach

The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these patients were unique only in that time had stopped inside their wounds, which were seemingly never to heal. The pain was so thick and palpable in the psych ward that a visitor could breathe it like the heavy humidity of summer air, and I soon realized that the challenge would not be to defend myself from patients, but to defend myself against my own increasing indifference toward them. What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding. — Hope Jahren

But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people's lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me. — Daniel Mason

A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest. — Paul Kalanithi

I'm training to become a giggle doctor. It's a kind of hospital clown who changes the atmosphere on the ward and helps recovery. It's about making patients laugh but also much more. — Nina Conti

Look at other countries that have tried to have federally controlled health care. They have poor-quality health care. Our health-care system is the envy of the world because we believe in making sure that the decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by officials in the nation's capital. — George W. Bush

The most popular Valentine's Day gift is chocolate. In the 1800's, doctors told their patients to eat chocolate to get over a broken heart. They also thought if you're going to be alone, who cares if you get fat. — Craig Ferguson

Dr. Sankhala is skilled in victimisation novel metastatic tumor medication for patients with advanced malignancies. — Cancercenter

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

This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, "There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology." My patients with incest histories were hardly free of "subsequent psychopathology" - they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that "such incestuous activity diminishes the subject's chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world."9 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The notion that only those who preach the gospel of integrated medicine are able to perform the art of medicine is as ridiculous as it is insulting to everyone in healthcare who does his/her best to meet the needs of their patients. The assumption that unproven or disproven treatments become acceptable simply because they are often administered in a kind and caring fashion is quite simply not true. — Edzard Ernst

I sank into the chair and checked to see if the charge nurse could see me - not if I didn't lean out too far. The night was looking up! Two patients who ought to sleep all night long, and an Internet connection. How lucky was I? Pretty damn lucky, at least until someone needed a diaper change. — Cassie Alexander

The way to succeed is giving people a noble reason to do something despicable. And my patients ... my clients, my characters are doing kind of scamming, deceptive things but they're doing them for noble reasons. Typically to be loved, to be accepted, to trick someone into embracing them and care for them. — Chuck Palahniuk

Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients. — Abraham Verghese

(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses. — Simon Singh

Providing patients and consumers with solid information on the cost and quality of their healthcare options can literally make the difference between life or death; and play a decisive role in whether a family or employer can afford healthcare. — Timothy Murphy

AS I TELL MY PATIENTS, your skin, hair, and nails are repairable and replaceable, and most of your organs can be revitalized. But the brain is the one organ you can't replace (no matter what you've seen in horror movies). The brain is where your life resides. It governs all aspects of your health as well as your emotional state. And while you can't get a new brain, you can improve the one you have. There are many different ways to literally make your brain younger which can enhance every facet of your health. This chapter will show how you can lose weight permanently once you balance your brain. Without taking the brain into account, you can diet for the rest of your life and never be happy with the results. — Eric R. Braverman

From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me. — Irvin D. Yalom

Our mother had faith in literature the way others had faith in God or America; she put herself in its hands the way patients did their physicians; she prescribed it, she preached it. — Antonya Nelson

The best patients are the worst patients. Nudge, nudge, nudge. Don't sit back and accept anything that fails to satisfy you. Speak up, protect your interests. — Claire Fagin

This wish to satisfy someone greater than the Self, to be found acceptable, to belong at last, is a struggle familiar to many psychotherapy patients. In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of others. They try to be practical, to be reasonable, to figure it all out in their heads. It is as though if only they could get the words straight in their heads, if only they could find the correct formula, then everything else in their lives would be magically straightened out. They are sure there is a right way to do things, though they have not yet found it. Someone in authority must know ... It is as thought if it were discovered that two and two really did not equal four (but five), then at that moment all over the world every machine would stop operating, all of the lights would go out. (110) — Sheldon B. Kopp

Survival rates for breast cancer are relatively good, but Krishnan has been around illness enough to know there is usually a cruel injustice about the way it strikes. Cranky patients defy the odds, while the kind ones, the ones who bake him cookies or bring him tomatoes from their garden, always seem to die early. Mortality rates utilize the law of averages without consideration for who is most deserving. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

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

The work of a psychotherapist involves being empathic and insightful with one's patients without getting too lost in their painful stories to be helpful. — Pamela Stephenson

I asked Phil Prentiss what he would do if they never got a baby and he said they'd die with a lot of excess love in their hearts ... ." "And let's not," Jack said. "Let's spend every drop. On the kids, on our families, on your patients, on the town. On people we don't know yet and the ones who have been our good friends forever. On each other. Let's spend our last drop as we're taking our last breaths. — Robyn Carr

As a physician, I would never encroach upon the religious freedoms of my patients. — Ami Bera

It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients. — Aristotle.

Human bodies are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of much of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today. Many studies show that depressed patients who stick to a regimen of aerobic exercise improve as much as those treated with medication. — Andrew Weil

Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, "And how is the 'complete experience'?" I told her, she said, "And do you think the 'complete experience' might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?" I told her, she said, "We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph," she said. "Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown. — Joshua Ferris

I imagine him grown up and finished with med school, patients lying on the operating table - reaching inside people's rib cages, fixing their broken hearts. — Katie Cotugno

Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best. — Ben Goldacre

In the debate over opioid addiction, there's one group we aren't hearing from: chronic pain patients, many of whom need to use the drugs on a long-term basis. — S. E. Smith

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day. — John Piper

Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. — Ezekiel Emanuel

We should listen less to the opinions of those who either overtly promote or stubbornly reject complementary and alternative medicine without acceptable evidence. The many patients who use complementary and alternative medicine deserve better. Patients and healthcare providers need to know which forms are safe and effective. Its future should (and hopefully will) be determined by unbiased scientific evaluation. — Edzard Ernst