Quotes & Sayings About Sick Patients

It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary. It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities, by laying my hand upon the place, and extending my fingers toward it. Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another. — Hippocrates

...younger patients, known as 'Acutes' because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed... — Ken Kesey

More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his weight behind an initiative, funded by - of course - the Templeton Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for sick patients improves their health.36 — Richard Dawkins

The greatest handicap faced by the psychiatrist was, he argued, the inability to experience their patients' conditions; but hashish gave them a means to do so, safely and reversibly:

Can we be certain we are in a condition to understand these sick people when they tell us of their observations? [...] To comprehend the ravings of a madman, it is necessary to have raved oneself, but without having lost the awareness of one's madness. -Mike Jay — Cameron Adams

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age. — Thomas Szasz

you come to rely, more than anything else, on first sight. You walk into the room and you think, sick or not sick. Not sick goes home as fast as possible. Sick, you watch. You draw blood, you order X rays, you give them fluids. You are careful, because a little bell went off in your head when you walked into the room and saw them. — Frank Huyler

As many citizens can attest, the U.S. is a great place to get sick, but a terrible place to stay well. This requires a shift in the way both doctors and patients approach health maintenance and disease prevention. — Rob Wittman

I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient. — Ornette Coleman

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water. — Paul Farmer

He, who for an ordinary cause, resigns the fate of his patient to mercury, is a vile enemy to the sick; and, if he is tolerably popular, will, in one successful season, have paved the way for the business of life, for he has enough to do, ever afterward, to stop the mercurial breach of the constitutions of his dilapidated patients. He has thrown himself in fearful proximity to death, and has now to fight him at arm's length as long as the patient maintains a miserable existence. — Nathaniel Chapman

Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't? A decade — Atul Gawande

Physicians, though they put their patients to much pain, will not destroy their nature, but will raise it up by degrees. Surgeons will pierce and cut but not mutilate. A mother who has a sick and self-willed child will not cast it away for this reason. And shall there be more mercy in the stream than there is in the spring? Shall we think there is more mercy in ourselves than in God, who plants the feeling of mercy in us? — Richard Sibbes

If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient, "because it is not her business," I should say that nursing was not her calling. I have seen surgical "sisters," women whose hands were worth to them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room or hut, because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power. But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling - the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their "place" to do - and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of a nurse in them. — Florence Nightingale

It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. — Bill Bryson

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

Am I not as much a doctor as they? I too have my patients; in the first place, theirs, whom they call sick; and then my own, whom I call unfortunate. — Victor Hugo

An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. — Richard Dawkins

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

I had realized many years before why "patients" are called that; it's because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are not sick. — Diana Gabaldon

Our increasing use of drugs to treat these conditions doesn't address the real issues: What are these patients trying to cope with? What are their internal or external resources? How do they calm themselves down? Do they have caring relationships with their bodies, and what do they do to cultivate a physical sense of power, vitality, and relaxation? Do they have dynamic interactions with other people? Who really knows them, loves them, and cares about them? Whom can they count on when they're scared, when their babies are ill, or when they are sick themselves? Are they members of a community, and do they play vital roles in the lives of the people around them? What specific skills do they need to focus, pay attention, and make choices? Do they have a sense of purpose? What are they good at? How can we help them feel in charge of their lives? — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated "all my homosexual patients are quite sick" - to which I finally replied "so are all my heterosexual patients. — Ernest Van Den Haag

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. — Bill Bryson

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

The doctors snap at the nurses, who snap at the patient care assistants, who snap at the cleaners, who snap at the patients who are too sick to respond. Those at the bottom of the heap have no choice but to be good. No one can doubt the virtue of the helpless. — Jinat Rehana Begum

Axiom: that illness isn't productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it's an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it. — Margaret Atwood

Everyone works in the service of man. We doctors work directly on man himself ... The great mystery of man is Jesus: 'He who visits a sick person, helps me,' Jesus said ... Just as the priest can touch Jesus, so do we touch Jesus in the bodies of our patients ... We have opportunities to do good that the priest doesn't have. Our mission is not finished when medicines are no longer of use. We must bring the soul to God; our word has some authority ... Catholic doctors are so necessary! — Gianna Beretta Molla

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