Patients Quotations

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.

I had the opportunity of making necropsies on patients dead from malignant fever and of studying the melanaemia, i.e., the formation of black pigment in the blood of patients affected by malaria.

We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.

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.

Epilepsy is a disease in the shadows. Patients are often reluctant to admit their condition - even to close family, friends or co-workers - because there's still a great deal of stigma and mystery surrounding the disease that plagued such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

Medicines are unusual commodities. Important drugs can save the lives and protect the health of millions. Their consumption can bring huge benefits, by helping patients to avoid infection and preventing serious damage to the economies of families, nations and even humanity at large.

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.

The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.

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.

When patients are admitted to hospital for elective surgery or non-urgent conditions, their vital signs are only monitored every four hours, unless they have been identified as being at high risk of deterioration.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

Life had stopped for her a long time ago. She was so out of touch with her feelings that she had no joy in her life and no concept of the fact that she could be wrong. She delivered her care of her insane patients in a killing manner, but she was convinced she was right.

My job as a surgeon is not just to fix a joint, but to give my patients the encouragement and tools they need to speed up their recovery and leave my clinic better than they have been in years.

I tell residents, if you gave me two patients with identical problems, and one of them had family at the bedside with a lot of laughter, plus photos and a quilt from home, and next door was another patient who was alone every time I came by - I'm going to be very nervous about the isolated patient's mental status.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

I'm training to become a giggle doctor. It's a kind of hospital clown who changes the atmosphere on the ward and helps recovery. It's about making patients laugh but also much more.

You'd believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don't take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital.

The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.

Washington is broken. Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of patients and lowering health costs.

It was so frustrating to see ulcer patients having surgery, or even dying, when I knew a simple antibiotic treatment could fix the problem.

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.

The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.

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.

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.

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

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

We're really going after truly creating sustainability of a disease-free state, creating a complete system for managing cancer patients for life, so that you can manage from onset of disease all the way through.

We have thousands of patients and family members who are dealing with dual devastation, cancer and the hurricane.

When the FDA forces an old drug off the market, patients have very little say in the matter. Patients have even less of a say when the FDA chooses not to approve a new drug. Instead, we are supposed to rely on the FDA's judgment and be grateful. But can the FDA really make a choice that is appropriate for everyone? Of course not.

My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

I understand what it's like to go to hospitals and there's no medicine, and the best thing you have to give the patients is compassion.

I've been focused on detecting nuclear terrorism at ports, in cargo containers, and I developed and built detectors that are extremely cheap and also very sensitive. My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer.

Where patient needs are complex, we should provide greater support in the community so that patients can cut down on trips to the tertiary hospital.

Patients can often be discharged from hospital, then re-admitted a few days later with complications.

In the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there is widespread access to dialysis, most of it publicly funded. But in many countries, the majority of patients who need dialysis die without it.

Patients are becoming aware that they're being taken for a ride by big pharma companies. They charge high prices and have never cared for India's healthcare. There are 23 million cases of cancer every year and India has a fair share of that.

Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

I use music in the operating room to help create a healing environment for patients and staff. There is a reason that certain heart rates are healthy and certain beats of music heal and relax us.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.

It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.

Providing patients and consumers with solid information on the cost and quality of their healthcare options can literally make the difference between life or death; and play a decisive role in whether a family or employer can afford healthcare.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.

The stronger ties between primary care providers and the patients they serve will produce better outcomes and allow for more sustainable healthcare spending.

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

Life is a terminal condition. Were all going to die. Cancer patients just have more information, but we all, in some ways, wait for permission to live.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.

The interesting thing about the miracle berry in chemo patients is that it actually straightens out their taste buds, whereas for you and I, it blocks our bitter and sour receptors. For them, it straightens them out to taste food as it normally tastes.

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.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.

What saddens me is seeing patients who have been going to therapy for years and years with no change, but they keep going to the same therapist. To me, that's not right.

My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease.

I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with.

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.

We know, in Wales or in England - you simply can't trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won't let them; we'll always fight for the NHS.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Federal laws against kickbacks bar pharmaceutical companies from directly giving money to patients for co-payments on the drugs they make.

HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.

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.

Most patients enter a doctor's office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.

The mind controls so much of the body. We are much more than flesh and blood; we are complex systems. Patients do better when they have faith that they're going to do better. That's why I always tell my patients and their families not to neglect their prayers. There's nobody I don't say that to.

One of the potential uses we envision is to use the ART treatment as a way to use tumor components to immunize cancer patients against their own cancer cells, ... The current problem with this treatment strategy is that the tumor gives off a variety of soluble products which we don't fully understand, but which we know wreck havoc on the immune system by suppressing its various components. If we can use the ART drugs to increase the number of newly produced T cells in cancer patients first, we can potentially improve the likelihood of getting a cancer vaccine to work.

One of the key factors contributing to this country's rising asthma epidemic is that patients are not equipped to recognize and manage their triggers and symptoms. As a result, patients don't effectively communicate with their doctors and end up comprising basic daily activities.

On the 20th of May, 1747, I took twelve patients in the scurvy on board the Salisbury at sea. Their cases were as similar as I could have them.

On the basis of these results, our care of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer must change today.

I would give it to all of my friends and patients who are 60 years of age or over and haven't yet had shingles.

One of those patients was more than 100 years old, quite frail, with advanced cancer and multiple other medical problems. The other one was dead. It made us wonder whether something wasn't missing from those guidelines.

One-third of the hospital is so old, we couldn't put patients in it.

One thing that's important to remember is that these are individual patients -- your son or daughter who went to an emergency with a broken arm or your grandma who ended up there with a heart condition.

One important finding is that most patients reported that their surgeons recommended the less invasive treatment. Second, patients had substantial involvement in the decision-making process. More patient involvement, though, yielded more mastectomy, not less.

One misconception is that we work for insurance companies or the Division of Worker's Compensation. We're doctors who take care of patients the same as anyone.

More than one billion people around the world suffer from neurological conditions and diseases, and finding new, more effective treatments for patients is a high priority for Pfizer research and development.

Monogram believes that collaborations such as this are vital to developing the kind of advanced diagnostics and novel therapeutics that will make personalized medicine for individual cancer patients a reality.

My concern is a single concern - can we keep a safety net under patients so they don't end up in a health crisis just because they cannot get medicine or care? I don't think the system is meeting the needs of the uninsured right now. It's overwhelmed.

My concern is that anyone who wants to help has to understand this is three times a week for four hours each session. Without this treatment, patients get very sick, very fast.

Now the GI recovery patients spill over to the ER rooms. When we're all done, it will be on a different floor. There will be two GI suites, a special procedure suite and 11 recovery rooms, as well as a dedicated nursing staff.

Nurses are with patients 10-12 hours per day giving old-fashioned care. This is a chance to say thank you to them.

Now they tell their patients to go to hospital emergency rooms if they get sick. We hope to make one-on-one visits with area doctors and convince them to refer their patients after hours to be seen.

Now we're still seeing patients who are dying of hemorrhagic shock from penetrating torso injuries that would not respond to a tourniquet, so that's an example of where our research priorities should be. They should be oriented toward those particular types of injuries and treating shock from those injuries because we don't have a good product for that. That's the sort of important information that we need to get out of this type of analysis.

No other policy sells patients health care coverage that promises so much yet delivers so little.

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.'

Pharmaceutical Web sites are increasingly reaching out directly to patients as well as the medical community through their Web sites. These sites have become valuable tools as consumers seek to learn more about medical options and treatments before agreeing to them. These sites tend to developed for both consumers and the medical community.

People who've had a stroke often lose arm function, and it can take a lot of hard work to get it back. The robotic arm allows patients to perform guided and assisted movements over and over again--up to 1,000 repetitions an hour--to improve range of motion, strength and ultimately function in the arm.

People will have to be motivated for behavioral change, providers will have to take greater responsibility for educating and monitoring patients and organizations will need to develop and provide better and more effective tools and interventions.

Right now at one year, we have over 90 percent of the patients alive...more importantly is that it continues to work. Over 80 percent of the patients are much improved and better than they have been,

If we can raise the money in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, that's great, we'll get started on the project right away. If the fund-raising goes more slowly, we may need to look at other things the hospital can do to help. That might mean providing a bus for transporting dialysis patients back and forth to Sioux City.

If we can use PET scanning to follow response, patients won't need repeated invasive tests. This would save them from getting an added surgical procedure. And we can see, in a very short time, probably in less than a week, whether the drug is working.

If we're going to do this operation at all in patients 65 and older, it should really be done in places that can deliver the lowest risks to the patient.