Top 100 The Patient Quotes
#1. The fears are unanimous. ObamaCare is too expensive. It is a government takeover of our healthcare system. Services will be diminished. The patient-doctor relationship will be eliminated. It will not make healthcare more affordable. And it will bankrupt small businesses.
Joseph M. Kyrillos
#2. The consultant's first obligation is to the patient, not to his brother physician.
Burton J. Hendrick
#3. We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.
Alfred Adler
#4. The most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient.
Dave DeBronkart
#5. A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.
Jean Kerr
#6. Success is like the most beautiful woman:
pursued by many, loved by all, feared by few,
courted by the patient and hardworking,
and won over by good judgment.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#7. If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer.
Abram Hoffer
#8. Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.
Paul Monette
#9. The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.
Sigmund Freud
#10. The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.
Abraham Flexner
#11. The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#12. Beauty in a woman is a moving thing, Yet sometimes just the patient lack of it Will pierce the heart to deeper poignancies, And, melting, draw a note of tenderness That not the fairest woman could evoke!
Donald Evans
#13. Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
Sinclair Lewis
#14. What a doctor or healer tells you is a reflection of the beliefs and expectations you hold. Change your beliefs and you change the prognosis. Who is the doctor? The mind of the patient.
Alan Cohen
#15. Tidy fees are the most effective remedy, both for the doctor and the patient.
Dario Fo
#16. Shamanism is a great metal and emotional adventure, one in which the patient as well as the shaman-healer are involved
Michael Harner
#17. The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.
Norman Cousins
#18. By examining the tongue of the patient, physicians find out the diseases of the body, and philosophers the diseases of the mind.
Justin Martyr
#19. "Tell me, doctor, " said the patient, "when I stand on my head, the blood rushes to it. Why doesn't it rush to my feet now?" "That's because your feet aren't empty," said the doctor.
Sam Ewing
#20. The long-term benefit of homeopathy to the patient is that it not only alleviates the presenting symptoms but it reestablishes internal order at the deepest levels and thereby provides a lasting cure.
George Vithoulkas
#21. If I didn't have this affliction, I would be the first. As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient's own arrangement, which only he can change.
Alfred Adler
#22. You stand for what is right-
for the patient and the staff.
Pressures of work may down you,
maybe bent but not broken.
Mujel Hasan
#23. Opportunity may come to the patient, but always comes to the persistent.
Jeffrey Fry
#24. There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
Booker T. Washington
#25. The bitterness of the potion, and the abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation. It must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach that must purge and cure it.
Michel De Montaigne
#26. In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
James Hillman
#27. The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.
Thomas Szasz
#28. They'd insert a probe into the patient's head to press the nodule and the patient's immediate response would be to shout out, "FUCK IT! WHY NOT?
Jeremy Robert Johnson
#29. A Marine should be sworn to the patient endurance of hardships, like the ancient knights; and it is not the least of these necessary hardships to have to serve with sailors.
Bernard Law Montgomery
#30. Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
Dick Cavett
#31. 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
#32. The doctor, if he forgets he is only the assistant to nature and zealously takes over the stage, may so add to what nature is already doing well that he actually throws the patient into shock by the vigour he adds to nature's forces.
Herbert Ratner
#33. The patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
Hippocrates
#34. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#35. For the record, I believe that women and their doctors should have access to oral contraception when desired by the patient and medically appropriate.
Ami Bera
#36. If there is one thing for which the 'Real Housewives' franchise deserves artistic recognition, it is the patient and immaculate building of a villain.
Andrea Seigel
#37. If there was anything obviously heroic about medieval surgery, it was the patient.
David C. Lindberg
#38. I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
Abraham Verghese
#39. The purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient's conversion to the therapist's interpretation.
Adolf Grunbaum
#40. Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.
Charles Lamb
#41. Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.
Rohinton Mistry
#42. In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
Michael Ondaatje
#43. Right now, the United States of America is the patient. And the patient is in critical condition and will not be cured by political correctness and will not be cured by timidity.
Benjamin Carson
#44. Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease ... Put yourself in his place ... The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.
William Osler
#45. The man breathed deeply with his eyes shut and his speech trailed off. Nick approached the patient with the syringe in hand, nodding. He turned the machine up now, almost all the way, and then proceeded with the injection.
I think you're about ready.
Jackie Sonnenberg
#46. 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
#48. By more than two to one Americans do not consider what Kevorkian did, injecting a terminally ill patient with legal drugs at the patient's request, to be the same as murder. You may want to note that laws are not supposed to be enforced on the basis of public opinion polls.
Dan Rather
#49. We need to start treating the patient as well as the disease,
Patch Adams
#50. Healthcare should be between the doctor and the patient. And if the doctor says something needs to be done, the government should guarantee it gets paid for.
Michael Moore
#51. I have volunteered for Musicians on Call for the past 12 years because of the incredible one-on-one experiences in hospital rooms when no one other than the patient and I would remember the love that was exchanged.
Rachel Platten
#52. The doctor says to the patient, "Take your clothes off and stick your tongue out the window". "What will that do" asks the patient. The doctor says "I'm mad at my neighbor!".
Henny Youngman
#53. Hospitals have missed the point that the best way to improve the patient experience is to build better engagement with their employees, who will then provide better service and health care to patients.
Paul Spiegelman
#54. The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.
C. G. Jung
#55. This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.
Nigel Farage
#56. The integration of exponentially growing technologies is beginning to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick.
Daniel Kraft
#57. An untreatable diagnosis is a statement about the medical system, not the patient.
Barbara Brennan
#58. If you explain to a patient what can be done and what might be the downsides, let the patient choose; don't have ethicists, priests, or doctors say you may or may not have replacement cells.
John Gurdon
#59. Ultimately, health care fails the most basic test. It's not organized around the needs of the patient.
Michael Porter
#60. 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
#61. The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process , that is by the completion of self-reflection , and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves
Jurgen Habermas
#62. Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status.
Joe Murray
#63. There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
Oliver Sacks
#64. On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.
John Ruskin
#65. There was no way I could be confident! But it was obvious that the patient will die if I don't do something!
-Dr. Honma
Osamu Tezuka
#66. The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.
Ramakrishna
#67. The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind
these are right and proper ideals for life.
Michael Dirda
#68. Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.
Hippocrates
#69. Medicine is for the patient.
Medicine is for the people.
It is not for the profits.
George W. Merck
#70. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Sigmund Freud
#71. When different identity states convey contradictory information and then have amnesia for what the other identity states said, the patient may be thought to be lying. This can appear to be characterological mendacity when it is not.
Elizabeth F. Howell
#72. I think 'Red Band Society' is unique because not only is it focusing on a pediatric ward, but it's from the view from the patient, not from the view of the doctors. So we're getting to see a whole other side of hospitals and medical series life that we haven't been able to see before.
Ciara Bravo
#73. Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.
Janet Malcolm
#74. As soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironic way - by applying paradoxical intention - the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies.
Viktor E. Frankl
#75. A doctor is a man who writes prescriptions, till the patient either dies or is cured by nature.
John Taylor
#76. The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. 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
#78. Thinking about interior peace destroys interior peace. The patient who constantly feels his pulse is not getting any better.
Hubert Van Zeller
#80. We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own. If the patient dies from the treatment, it was not because the medicine was not good.
Zora Neale Hurston
#81. If we didn't kill the tumor, we killed the patient. - William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#82. While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
Murray Rothbard
#83. Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies- the patient's lies to the psychoanalyst- are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so ...
Italo Calvino
#84. When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.
Josh Gates
#85. Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.
Elbert Hubbard
#86. We try to remember that medicine is for the patient. We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been,
George W. Merck
#87. To Wordsworth nature was the nurse; to us, it's the patient.
Robert Hillman
#88. DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician's forecast of disease by the patient's pulse and purse.
Ambrose Bierce
#89. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.
Richard Rohr
#90. The patient must be at the center of this transition. Our largest struggle is not with the patient who takes their medication regularly, but with the patient who does not engage in their own care. Technology can be the driver that excites a patient with the prospect of wellness.
Stephen Beck
#91. In my business, if I get too close to you and you die, it hurts me. And so you develop a natural inclination not to be close to the patient, so that if things don't work out ideally, you can still get up the next day and care for the next patient.
Mehmet Oz
#92. Time is the great doctor of your life. You have to respect the doctor. The devouring self is the patient. Listen to the doctor.
Ruben Papian
#93. 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
#94. A lot of patients you know if you haven't seen them for 6 months or a year, you won't remember what medicines they're on or what kind of problems they have. And you know I'd feel much better if I know a little bit about the patient before I walk in the room, so I won't be too surprised.
William Davis
#95. Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and foreboding.
Norman Cousins
#96. It's very easy to not know the stuff that you should know about the patient when you're seeing them. It's much easier with an electronic system to find them, because it's all right there and it should be current.
William Davis
#97. Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.
Mark Kermode
#98. I am like a doctor. I have written a prescription to help the patient. If the patient doesn't want all the pills I've recommended, that's up to him. But I must warn that next time I will have to come as a surgeon with a knife.
Javier Perez De Cuellar
#99. Above all, the clinician must not shake what little faith the patient has in himself.
Leston Havens
#100. If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt at cover-up will ultimately backfire. At some level the patient will sense you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer. Furthermore, an open admission of error is good model-setting for patients and another sign that they matter to you.
Irvin D. Yalom
