Quotes About Doctors And Patients

#1. 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

#2. Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.

Ben Goldacre

#3. 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

#4. My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.

Henry Marsh

#5. I did a show called 'Wonderland' a few years back, and I was fortunate enough to spend a full-on two weeks - I'm talking 13-15 hours a day - with the doctors and patients at Bellevue in New York. That served me well for 'Durham County.'

Michelle Forbes

#6. Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends.

Andrew Weil

#7. We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.

Michael Lewis

#8. Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

Jodi Picoult

#9. Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O'Connor

#10. Medicines cure diseases, but only doctors can cure patients.

Carl Jung

#11. The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him away from patients, pills, and potions ...

William Osler

#12. Doctors who spend more time talking into their tape recorders instead of looking into the eyes of their patients. (Spare us the "HMOs only give us so much time" diatribe. Medicine is about giving scared people comfort and help for people whose pain level is matched only by their anxiety level.)

Karl Albrecht

#13. Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#14. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. I

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#15. Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.

Jean Leclercq

#16. Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.

Ron Wyden

#17. Doctors try to get rid of their patients - clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church.

Alan W. Watts

#18. 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

#19. Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.

Suzy Kassem

#20. Before you diagnose any sickness, make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart. For the emotions in a man's moon or sun, can point to the sickness in any one of his other parts.

Suzy Kassem

#21. So the effect of this Republican provision to allow doctors to be gagged from even discussing abortion with their patients is outrageous.

Frank Lautenberg

#22. I have seen doctors, in good faith, leave patients on steroids for years, thinking they are doing right. A friend of mine was on steroids for so long, she has severe osteoporosis.

Mary Ann Mobley

#23. ...younger patients, known as 'Acutes' because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed...

Ken Kesey

#24. There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

Oliver Sacks

#25. Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.

Anurag Shourie

#26. It's like doctors can't save all their patients, but, on balance, Bain under Gov. Romney created well over 100,000 jobs, which is certainly more than has been created in the Obama administration because we're down over 500,000 over the last three-and-a-half years.

Jim Talent

#27. My father was a doctor. He was just a great guy, a gentle humanist, and an old-fashioned GP. He'd get up at three in the morning to see patients in different areas if they needed him.

Roselee Goldberg

#28. 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

#29. Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge.

Rebecca Skloot

#30. Could a mariner sit idle if he heard the drowning cry? Could a doctor sit in comfort and just let his patients die? Could a fireman sit idle, let men burn and give no hand? Can you sit at ease in Zion with the world around you damned?

Leonard Ravenhill

#31. Great hospitals do two things. They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.

David Ogilvy

#32. Using this novel method, doctors could treat female patients without violating the honor of her family.

Jack Weatherford

#33. I do believe that, in time, doctors - both alternative and orthodox - will begin using whatever is the highest best treatment for their patients, regardless of the modality.

Brandon Bays

#34. Moist was sure doctors keep skeletons around to cow patients. Nyer, nyer, we know what you look underneath ...

Terry Pratchett

#35. Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the 'slippery slope': once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.

Peter Singer

#36. Indie authors write, design, sell. Like magic, skip one and you make must read vanish.

Temple Emmet Williams

#37. The more fashionable doctors in Italy, began to delegate to slaves the manual attentions they deemed necessary for their patients ... that the art of medicine went to ruin.

Andreas Vesalius

#38. What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

Paul Kalanithi

#39. The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

Atul Gawande

#40. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

Atul Gawande

#41. The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

George Bernard Shaw

#42. There's a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, 'I don't want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don't want some machine between me and my patients.'

Mitch Kapor

#43. I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it's not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.

Atul Gawande

#44. Never congratulate a doctor for the fast recovery of a patient.

Raheel Farooq

#45. The doctor will persist in laboring under the delusion that patients want common sense instead of magic.

Rae Foley

#46. Patients who trust their doctors and have a psychological expectation of getting better could trigger a reaction in their body.

Irving Kirsch

#47. People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

Ben Carson

#48. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients.

Ronald Reagan

#49. Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.

Virginia Postrel

#50. 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

#51. Doctors frequently get it wrong. One out of five patients today is in the hospital because incorrect treatment by a physician put him or her there.

Andrew Saul

#52. Perhaps this is the solution to medicine's midlife crisis, too: doctors focusing on their noble craft, their relationships with patients, the stuff over which we have some control. Ultimately, this may be the best hope for our professional salvation.

Sandeep Jauhar

#53. Jay Levy saw ten women," the doctor later recalled, "And he thought they were all hysterical. Then he saw a man, whose complaints he took seriously.

Hillary Johnson

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there's anything in the father worth seeing. Until he's dead, and it's too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients.

Pat Barker

#57. Patients want to be seen as people. For me, the person's life comes first; the disease is simply one aspect of it, which I can guide my patients to use as a redirection in their lives. When doctors look at their patients, however, they are trained to see only the disease.

Bernie Siegel

#58. Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.

R.D. Laing

#59. Other doctors lose as many patients as I do, he would say. But with me they die happier.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#60. Nineteen percent of doctors say that they'd be able to give their patients a lethal injection. But they also went on to say that the patient would have to be really, really behind on payments.

Jay Leno

#61. If doctors just spent more time with their patients so they felt more reassured, that might help.

Irving Kirsch

#62. Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

Ayn Rand

#63. Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.

Alice Dreger

#64. One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients.

Eula Biss

#65. How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

Paul Kalanithi

#66. [the doctor] clicked by mistake on the notes of a patient she'd got to know well - too well. The unfortunate Mrs. Swayne had become unhealthily doctor-dependent. But had she grasped the nettle? Had she actually finally and against all predictions left the country?

Jane Wilson-Howarth

#67. We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

Atul Gawande

#68. Within every patient there resides a doctor, and we as physicians are at our best when we we put our patients in touch with the doctor inside themselves.

Albert Schweitzer

#69. Doctors think a lot of patients are cured who have simply quit in disgust.

Herbert Hoover

#70. A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.

Walter Lippmann

#71. Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

Richard Dawkins

#72. 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

#73. I think doctors care very deeply about their patients, but when they organize into the AMA, their responsibility is to the welfare of doctors, and quite often, these lobbying groups are the only ones that are heard in the state capitols and in the capitol of our country.

Jimmy Carter

#74. Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

Charles C. Mann

#75. The Doctor's Motto: Have patients.

Ethel Mumford

#76. We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.

David Horowitz

#77. I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.

Abraham Verghese

#78. There is alas no law against incompetency; no striking example is made. They learn by our bodily jeopardy and make experiments until the death of the patients, and the doctor is the only person not punished for murder.

Pliny The Elder

#79. there's that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they're personally invested in.

Paul Kalanithi

#80. Now that doctors have stopped making house calls, lots of patients now have to die without their help.

Milton Berle

#81. 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

#82. If you think about how healthcare is delivered, it's on an ad hoc basis. Someone comes into a hospital, someone comes into a pharmacy, someone comes into a doctor. But beyond those touchpoints, the patients are on their own. There's no real continuity of care.

Chris Viehbacher

#83. What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.

Aneurin Bevan

#84. Putting aside competitive interests for a new kind of collaboration, Maryland pioneered a real-time encounter notification service to alert primary care doctors when their patients are hospitalized.

Martin O'Malley

#85. After the example of his fellow-doctors, cured all the illnesses of his patients, except those of which they died
a habit unhappily acquired by all the members of all the faculties in whatever country they may practise.

Jules Verne

#86. If you think you can just go out and ask all the doctors in the world about what the did to all the patients and you think we can connect that into something useful, go talk to someone who has done that because we can't.

James Heywood

#87. 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

#88. Personally, I have always felt that the best doctor in the world is the Veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter ... he's just got to know.

Will Rogers

#89. There is survival behavior, and doctors need to learn from patients who do not die when they are supposed to, instead of saying, 'You're doing very well, so keep doing whatever you are doing.' They should be asking what their patient is doing and pass the information to other patients.

Bernie Siegel

#90. I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.

Bernie Siegel

#91. There are two things panic patients hate to do. They hate to take medication - and they hate to go to doctors. They hate to come to grips.

Earl Campbell

#92. Many different relationships among patients, doctors, and drugs are possible and desirable. As in so many other areas of life, the Internet encourages experimentation. Questionnaire-based pharmacies operate between the traditional prescription and over-the-counter models.

Virginia Postrel

#93. Few gynecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolpoof of solutions, namely, misterectomy.

Mary Daly

#94. 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