Best 1948 quotes in «doctors quotes» category

The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it.

The disability system employs ‘Expert Doctors’ that interview you and write reports that do not reflect your daily health problems in order to deny your earned disability payments.

The doctor arrived towards dinnertime and said, of course, that although recurring phenomena might well elicit apprehension, nonetheless there was, strictly speaking, no positive indication, yet since neither was there any contraindication, it might, on the one hand, be supposed, but on the other hand it might also be supposed. And it was therefore necessary to stay in bed, and although I don't like prescribing, nevertheless take this and stay in bed.

The doctor always prescribes the approximate, for there aren't any set of perfect treatments for diseases.

The doctor asks the patient some form of the following: “So, what is wrong?” (or, in my case, my doc always asks “So, what are your concerns?”). The doctor listens for an average of 9 seconds, then intervenes with a prognosis. The amount of time the doctor is willing to listen before intervening has gone down over time, presumably as health insurers have pressured doctors to increase throughput and as they have greatly increased the amount of paperwork required of doctors. In other words, it is in the name of efficiency. The efficiency fairies are at work in the doctor’s office to eliminate all that wasteful time spent in creating a doctor-patient relationship.

[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?

The few cures we have recorded could be multiplied many times over, many of them experienced by people who had failed to find relief through conventional medical treatment. If a story from Scotland is to be believed, the success of one holy well, St. Drostan's at Newdosk (Angus), was so distasteful to the local doctors that they decided to poison the well. When the people heard of their intention, they banded together to attack and kill the doctors!

The French doctor - the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors - says: "M'sieu, they have all been on the wrong track - ("Jane Brown's Body")

The majority of prescription medications that the doctors gave me degraded my health instead of improving it.

THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE Before you examine the body of a patient, Be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, You will also come to know His body. 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. 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. Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, Always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, But then later discovering that he will lose, Will harm him more than by telling him That he may lose, But then he wins. THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE by Suzy Kassem

The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.

The pressure remains all in one direction, toward doing more, because the only mistake clinicians seem to fear is doing too little. Most have no appreciation that equally terrible mistakes are possible in the other direction—that doing too much could be no less devastating to a person's life.

The midpoint in medicine between excessive emotional involvement with patients and a complete lack of empathy is not a simple one to locate.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor or that the woman's body is somehow "inadequate" - what I call the "woman's body as a lemon" assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs.

There are other doctors out there but there's only one [of your child].

There is no painkiller as effective as love, no anti-depressant as soothing as cheer, no defibrillator as powerful as wisdom.

There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yes the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.

There may be medical tools in your hands to treat the patient, but those hands must be that of a loving, warm and conscientious human being.

There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.

There seems little correlation between poverty and honesty. One would rather expect the opposite; dishonesty may not always pay but surely it sometimes does

There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.

The study of medicine consists on the one hand in storing up in the mind an enormous number of facts, which are simply memorized without any real knowledge of their foundations, and on the other hand in learning practical skills, which have to be acquired on the principle “Don’t think, act!” Thus it is that, of all the professionals, the medical man has the least opportunity of developing the function of thinking.

The sickest that I have ever been in life was when the doctors put me on a wide range of prescription medications and a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine.

The summit of Mauna Kea should never have been developed as it is not safe for humans up there. I am now locked into an endless loop of doctors visits for what appears to be classic very high altitude heart, lung & brain damage because I was unfortunate enough to have worked there.

This was the way of it with Parker. One kiss, and she was lost.

This brings to mind an expression I coined ages ago: A peach a day keeps the plague spirits away!' Percy sneezed. 'I though it was apples and doctors.' The karpos hissed. 'Or peaches,' Percy said. 'Peaches work too.' 'Peaches,' agrees the karpos. Percy wiped his nose. 'Not criticizing, but why is her grooting?

...the usual icing period (where the doctor doesn't come right away but leaves you there to freeze in your paper gown while scraping at the files on the outside of your door making you THINK he is going to come in but he doesn't)...

Understanding sickness in its whole form, reach and impact, automatically brings along the insight into wellness, just like understanding chaos with all its nuances brings along the true practical perception of harmony and the means to achieve it.

To confront death every day, to see it yourself, you have to love the living.

To become a good dog-doctor it is necessary to love dogs, but it is also necessary to understand them - the same as with us, with the difference that it is easier to understand a dog than a man and easier to love him.

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? . . . . Manual labour.

We are often given pills or fluids to help remedy illness, yet little has been taught to us about the power of smell to do the exact same thing. It is known that the scent of fresh rosemary increases memory, but this cure for memory loss is not divulged by doctors to help the elderly. I also know that the most effective use of the blue lotus flower is not from its dilution with wine or tea – but from its scent. To really maximize the positive effects of the blue lily (or the pink lotus), it must be sniffed within minutes of plucking. This is why it is frequently shown being sniffed by my ancient ancestors on the walls of temples and on papyrus. Even countries across the Orient share the same imagery. The sacred lotus not only creates a relaxing sensation of euphoria, and increases vibrations of the heart, but also triggers genetic memory - and good memory with an awakened heart ushers wisdom.

Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

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.

Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.

What's the problem? In a nutshell?" "I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

What does Mrs Preston want to go abroad for?' asked Mr Leslie. 'I think her doctor wanted her to, Father,' said Agnes. 'Doctors!' said Mr Leslie, wiping the whole of the Royal College of Physicians off the face of the world with this withering remark.

When I worked on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea we were advised to only use the medical oxygen after the daily headaches appeared and that just 15 minutes use was all that was needed to clear up the headaches for a while before we would need it again. We were not advised to use medical oxygen continuously as the Federal Aviation Regulations advises pilots to do. We were not advised to use pulse oximeters to monitor our blood oxygen levels or that the company medical oxygen should have been routinely administered only with our doctors prescription.

When a human doctor, after much bleeding and cupping, finds that a patient has died out of sheer desperation, he can always say, "Dear me, will of the gods, that will be thirty dollars please," and walk away a free man. This is because human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars. A doctor who lets one hurry off too soon to that great paddock in the sky may well expect to hear, out of some dark alley, a voice saying something on the lines of "Mr. Chrysoprase is very upset," and find the brief remainder of his life full of incident.

Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...

You cannot be a good doctor without pity.

Working with Parker today had left her almost as hot as she’d been bothered.

you come to rely, more than anything else, on first sight. You walk into the room and you think, sick or not sick. Not sick goes home as fast as possible. Sick, you watch. You draw blood, you order X rays, you give them fluids. You are careful, because a little bell went off in your head when you walked into the room and saw them.

You don’t need an extra blanket or a sweatshirt. You’ve got me to keep you warm.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

You have a history of starving yourself," he says gently. I lift my head. I meet his gaze. "I have a history that I don't like to talk about.

A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.

Your doctors have the ability to legally kill you with a cocktail of potent prescription drugs.