Quotes About Patients And Doctors

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

Virginia Postrel

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Jodi Picoult

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

William Osler

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Irving Kirsch

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Atul Gawande

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

Temple Emmet Williams

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

Richard Dawkins

#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. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. [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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Ben Goldacre

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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