Quotes About Patients

#1. 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

#2. Why are cancer patients so hard to buy for? This question always puzzles me. When people are healthy, things are so simple, including gift buying. A jaunt to the local mall or a day in front of the TV watching QVC can be just enough for all the loved ones on your list.

Jenna Morasca

#3. It's true what they say - sometimes the neuros are crazier than the patients.

Stephen King

#4. Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.

Karl Kraus

#5. Being an entrepreneur is a mental job...
It takes patients! YOU are doing more motivation to yourself than anyone on this planet.

Dee Williams

#6. He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, 'The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.' Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.

Katherine Dunn

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

Richard Dawkins

#8. The only English patients I have ever known refuse tea, have been typhus cases; and the first sign of their getting better was their craving again for tea.

Florence Nightingale

#9. Thoughts arise in the hostage's tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves.

Elie Wiesel

#10. I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

Robert Benchley

#11. A democratic medical establishment does not alter people's bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.

Alice Dreger

#12. I find that low protein diets often contribute to improvement in patients with immune system problems ... In fact, it would be hard to become deficient in protein in our country even if you tried.

Andrew Weil

#13. When God means you to be a healer he sends you patients; when he makes you a teacher he sends you pupils; when he destines you to be a Master he sends you stories .

Anthony De Mello

#14. Soap, gloves, isolating patients, not reusing needles and quarantining the contacts of the ill - in theory it should be very easy to contain Ebola

Peter Piot

#15. Writers without readers is like a doctor without patients.

Britt Holewinski

#16. Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing - and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.

Jacob M. Appel

#17. It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts.

Alan Brennert

#18. In general, there are patients with insomnia who - many patients with insomnia will actually over report the lack of sleep that they are getting.

Shelby Harris

#19. Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.

Diane Frolov

#20. He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#21. Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.

Chris Hadfield

#22. My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

Ami Bera

#23. Unfortunately, only a small number of patients with peptic ulcer are financially able to make a pet of an ulcer.

William James Mayo

#24. There are several patients - there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson's disease.

Miguel Nicolelis

#25. I peered around the corner into the main recovery ward. All I could see were surgeons. Surgeons filling out those incessant forms. Surgeons bringing cups of tea and little sandwich triangles to patients. Surgeons laying in a lethargic stupor, recovering from eye surgery.

Lauren Pearce

#26. These days the technology can solve our problems and then some. Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than 'able-bodied' folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.

Daniel H. Wilson

#27. Adversity is the nurse of greatness which roughly rocks her patients back to health.

William C. Bryant

#28. The people are Anchors," I say.
"People don't make good Anchors, though, Craig. They change. The people here are going to change. The patients are going to leave. You can't rely on them.

Ned Vizzini

#29. 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

#30. I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?

Irvin D. Yalom

#31. I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey

#32. I weighed 193 pounds and had three chins. I couldn't get up before 9 a.m. and never saw patients before 10. I decided to go on a diet.

Robert Atkins

#33. The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

Pauline Hanson

#34. Preliminary research-most of it published outside the medical literature-indicates that a significant number of our patients have experienced some form of violence and abuse during their lifetime, including elder abuse, child abuse, gang-related violence, sexual abuse, and domestic violence.

David Schneider

#35. Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.

Paul Farmer

#36. Patients with psoriatic arthritis often complain of fatigue. It may be defined as an overwhelming, sustained sense of exhaustion and reduced capacity for physical and mental work. Fatigue

Dafna Gladman

#37. As a practicing neurologist, I can tell you first hand that working with Parkinson's patients offers clinical challenges. But from an emotional perspective, this disease can border on overwhelming.

David Perlmutter

#38. Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.

Caitlin Doughty

#39. Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

Dave DeBronkart

#40. 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

#41. I realized then why I was avoiding all the other patients. They were all potential mirrors. What I really feared wasn't the insanity of strangers. What I feared the most was my own disease. I was terrified I would catch a glimpse of myself in passing.

Terri Cheney

#42. Patient autonomy is paramount to the oath that we take when we enter the profession of medicine. That is why I am appalled when the federal government gets between my patients and their right to the full range of medical information and complete access to health care.

Ami Bera

#43. She attempted to deal with her terror in a most ineffective and magical mode-a mode that I have seen many patients use: she attempted to elude death by refusing to live.

Irvin D. Yalom

#44. Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Craig Raine

#45. African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.

Xavier Becerra

#46. 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

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

Herbert Hoover

#48. 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

#49. It is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them.

Cornelius Van Til

#50. I have always made a distinction between healing and curing. To me, 'healed' represents a condition of one's life; 'cured' relates strictly to one's physical condition. In other words, there may be healed quadriplegics and AIDS patients, and cured cancer patients who are leading unhealthy lives.

Bernie Siegel

#51. If, over time, patients don't go to some services, then progressively they become less viable, so you do arrive at a point where the conclusion is: 'These are the right services for the future, and this is capacity we don't need.'

Andrew Lansley

#52. Our own unresolved authority problems from our youth sometimes get transferred to our youthful patients, because we are still "covert adolescent rebels." In subtle ways, we encourage the adolescent patient to rebel towards parents, school authorities, and society in general.

Virgil Miller Newton

#53. Many patients with cancer are depressed, yet depression is not the cause of cancer.

David S. Bell

#54. When the Veterans Affairs Department implemented a program to provide home-based health care to veterans with multiple chronic conditions - many of the system's most expensive patients to treat - they received astounding results.

Ron Wyden

#55. All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one's mind. After several months' confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate.

Nellie Bly

#56. I had patients who didn't die because they had too many pets to try to find homes for. It's why women live longer than men with the same health problems.

Bernie Siegel

#57. Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'

John Cornwell

#58. Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer's.

J. Thomas LaMont

#59. 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

#60. Too much profit is being made at the expense of unsuspecting patients.

Melissa Cady

#61. Half a psychiatrist's patients see him because they are married - the other half because they're not.

Arnold H. Glasow

#62. Key message to all patients: Let go of all negativity and empower your body through your positivity.

Widad Akreyi

#63. 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

#64. Being too happy is bad for you. 8 on 1 10-scale is just right. Eg. cancer patients are more likely to survive if they're at an 8 instead of 9 or 10.

Ed Diener

#65. Narcolepsy is a disorder that affects many different areas of life. So in typical patients with narcolepsy, they have something called "excessive daytime sleepiness." So, they're very sleepy during the day. Yet, at night, they're still sleepy, but their sleep is very broken.

Shelby Harris

#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. I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

Severo Ochoa

#68. If we hope for more significant therapeutic change, we must encourage our patients to assume responsibility - that is, to apprehend how they themselves contribute to their distress.

Irvin D. Yalom

#69. Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.

Virginia Postrel

#70. I'm not sure what Essiac does to extend cancer survival, and for all we know it may not have this effect. On the other hand, it's not toxic and my patients have reported feeling good while taking it, so why not support them?

Abram Hoffer

#71. If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

Michel Onfray

#72. There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.

Clayton M Christensen

#73. Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.

Xavier Becerra

#74. Taub Therapy gives patients hope that they can recapture the life they had before suffering a stroke or TBI.

Edward Taub

#75. Believe in your prayers. Believe in the power of your faith and blessings of your near and dear ones. Their love serves as a balm, soothes your heart and heals your body.

Sanchita Pandey

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

Paul Kalanithi

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

Eula Biss

#78. 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

#79. I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

Nellie Bly

#80. It was perhaps fortunate that I chanced to see Rebecca in her so-different modes -- so damaged and incorrigible in the one, so full of promise and potential in the other -- and that she was on of the first patients I saw in our clinic. For what I saw in her, what she showed me, I now saw in all.

Oliver Sacks

#81. 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

#82. It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.

Ivan Pavlov

#83. It's important right now to continue to have your patients contact their senators and their congresspeople to say we have a problem. We want you to help solve it, we want you to be involved.

Charlie Norwood

#84. Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.

Alex Berenson

#85. We are glad to tie up with a humanitarian organization, which is being promoted by Prince Abdul Aziz. This partnership will greatly help in assisting needy renal-failure patients by supplying them equipment, medicines and other medical supplies, while encouraging and supporting scientific research.

Sulaiman Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi

#86. Excitement is interwoven with uncertainty, and with our willingness to embrace the unknown rather than to shield ourselves from it. But this very tension leaves us feeling vulnerable. I caution my patients that there is no such thing as safe sex.

Esther Perel

#87. The account he gives of nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines.

Florence Nightingale

#88. But she was well used to stubborn patients, the majority of which were always of the male persuasion. She figured it had something to do with carrying a penis around all the time.

Jill Shalvis

#89. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients

Atul Gawande

#90. My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.

Pierre Omidyar

#91. An allopath comes and treats cholera patients and gives them his medicines. The Homeopath comes and gives his medicines and cures perhaps more than the allopath does because the Homoeopath does not disturb the patients but allows the nature to deal with them.

Swami Vivekananda

#92. 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

#93. I make my patients feel like they're still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race.

Samuel Shem

#94. IPS cells can become a powerful tool to develop new drugs to cure intractable diseases because they can be made from patients' somatic cells.

Shinya Yamanaka

#95. I hear from patients who say their doctor said, 'If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won't harm you, and it may do you some good.' More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.

Linus Pauling

#96. 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

#97. There had been a scandal: a year previously, the chair, Professor Gregoriades, had been accused of using a derogatory term in reference to some Asian patients.

Teju Cole

#98. Studies have shown that patients on hospice who become dehydrated in their final weeks, days, or hours, die much more comfortably than patients who are kept artificially hydrated with intravenous fluids or supplemental tube feedings.

Heidi Telpner

#99. When you think about it, caring for patients is 99 percent information and 1 percent intervention, so it's clear that with or without genomics, the paradigm is shifting. Bioinformatics brings a cutting edge capacity to healthcare.

Christopher G. Chute

#100. I know what's it's like to grow up with ADHD and how important it is for parents, caregivers and patients, to have access to accurate information.

Ty Pennington