Top 55 Physician Patient Quotes
#1. I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
Abraham Verghese
#2. It must depend as much upon the patient's willingness to be cured, as upon the physician's skill in curing. There is neither force not magic in psychiatry.
Phyllis Bottome
#3. Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help: that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. I don't think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient's illness. How would I deal with the kind of news I'd given Mr. Walters?
Abraham Verghese
#5. That physician is no better than a murderer, that negligently delayeth till his patient be dead or past cure (389).
Richard Baxter
#6. When Death lurks at the door, the physician is considered as a God. When danger has been overcome, the physician is looked upon as an angel. When the patient begins to convalesce, the physician becomes a mere human. When the physician asks for his fees, he is considered as the devil himself.
Hendrik Goltzius
#7. The consultant's first obligation is to the patient, not to his brother physician.
Burton J. Hendrick
#8. The miracle of self-healing occurs when the inner patient yields to the inner physician.
Vernon Howard
#9. The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.
Norman Cousins
#10. Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing.
Jerome Groopman
#11. 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
#12. The patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
Hippocrates
#13. A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.
Abraham Flexner
#14. The patient's autonomy always, always should be respected, even if it is absolutely contrary - the decision is contrary to best medical advice and what the physician wants.
Jack Kevorkian
#15. A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient; nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in a fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient; and looking upon them only as sick and extravagant.
Seneca.
#16. It has been well observed that the tongue discovers the state of the mind no less than that of the body; but in either case, before the philosopher or the physician can judge, the patient must open his mouth.
Charles Caleb Colton
#18. When he can render no further aid, the physician alone can mourn as a man with his incurable patient. This is the physician's sad lot.
Aretaeus Of Cappadocia
#19. More than one skillful physician has said that if one asks the right questions, the patient will make the diagnosis for you in his or her own words.
Andrew Weil
#20. I feel like a physician, one who's done a scan of the patient's body and seen evidence of a potentially serious issue.
Katharine Hayhoe
#21. The end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction; and he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies.
John Dryden
#22. A careful physician ... before he attempts to administer a remedy to his patient, must investigate not only the malady of the man he wishes to cure, but also his habits when in health, and his physical constitution.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#23. Gout, a physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient
Ambrose Bierce
#24. Medicine is not merely a science but an art. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than the drugs employed.
Paracelsus
#25. DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician's forecast of disease by the patient's pulse and purse.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.
Jacob M. Appel
#27. No," De Roos said. "You mustn't thank me. The relatives of patients thank the physician as if the physician were God. It's no good, and if the patient dies it turns to ash - not just for them, but, as you can imagine, for me. I'll see you later.
Mark Helprin
#28. Often the confidence of the patient in his physician does more for the cure of his disease than the physician with all his remedies. Reasserting the statement by Avicenna.
Henri De Mondeville
#29. This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death - examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it - as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.
Paul Kalanithi
#30. The physician who waits until dead certain of a diagnosis before acting is likely to wind up with a dead patient. Sometimes things develop so rapidly that only early action-back when you're still somewhat uncertain-stands a chance of being effective, as in catching cancer before it metastasizes.
Joel Garreau
#31. The physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.
Paul Kalanithi
#32. The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities.
Paracelsus
#33. God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
#34. When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.
Marcia Angell
#35. He is an unskilful physician that cannot cure one disease without casting his patient into another.
Thomas More
#36. The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it
Maimonides
#37. The physician of the soul is aware that his patient will receive no nourishment unless he has been cleaned out; and the soul of the Great King himself, if he has not undergone this purification, is unclean and impure.
Plato
#38. The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
Norman Cousins
#39. The first question an Ayurvedic physician asks is not 'What disease does my patient have?' but 'Who is my patient?' By 'who,' the physician does not mean your name, but how you are constituted.
Deepak Chopra
#40. We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
Abraham Verghese
#41. Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient. Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#42. To the sick man the physician when he enters seems to have three faces, those of a man, a devil, a god. When the physician first comes and announces the safety of the patient, then the sick man says: Behold a God or a guardian angel!
John Owen
#43. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
#44. Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Ambrose Bierce
#45. What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?
Honore De Balzac
#46. The physician, to the extent he is a physician, considers only the good of the patient in what he prescribes, and his own not at all
Plato
#47. The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
William Osler
#48. The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must cooperate with the physician in combatting the disease.
Hippocrates
#49. We must be careful how we flatter fools too little, or wise men too much, for the flatterer must act the very reverse of the physician, and administer the strongest dose only to the weakest patient.
Charles Caleb Colton
#50. The medicalization of early diagnosis not only hampers and discourages preventative health-care but it also trains the patient-to-be to function in the meantime as an acolyte to his doctor. He learns to depend on the physician in sickness and in health. He turns into a life-long patient.
Ivan Illich
#51. The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
Abraham Verghese
#52. The erosion of an effective patient-physician relationship has no place when dealing with chronic pain. Worst of all, dismissing the patient's pain is as devastating as crushing a patient's hope.
Melissa Cady
#53. If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.
Aristotle.
#54. It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.
Aristotle.
#55. Every physician must be rich in knowledge, and not only of that which is written in books; his patients should be his book, they will never mislead him.
Paracelsus
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