Jane Mayer Quotes

When I took the Hippocratic oath and was effectively 'sworn in' as a doctor, I took the same vow that doctors have taken for generations. Patient autonomy is core to this oath.

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.

If I'm at the front line and refuse to treat a patient, it's considered a crime. As a physician, this is my oath. I'm going to treat everyone regardless.

I don't trust doctors. It's not to say there ain't some good ones, but on a general level, no, I wouldn't trust 'em at all.

Doctors have an ethical duty to follow the practices and standards of care.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence.

Committing unnecessary surgeries is very, very rare. And it's very wrong.

Whether it's possible or not, being a doctor, you take an oath. To care for your patient, not to kill them. You take an oath to do things that are proper in the medical world. Not to administer something outside of a hospital setting that's not even your area.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

No health care provider may be penalized for discussing medically necessary or appropriate care with or on behalf of his or her patient.

There is a pervasive lack of accountability in medicine that extends from the most newly qualified doctor right through the most senior professors.

Performing unconsented surgeries is considered battery because the patient can't voice their opinion - they're unconscious.

Health care decisions are the sole province of an individual, her family, her doctor and her faith. Fear of the law has no place in the equation.

Don't tell me it doesn't work. Torture works. Okay, folks?

The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.

Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

Coercion. The unpardonable crime.

That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.

(Doctors) collectively have done more to block adequate medical care for people of this country than any other single group.

It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.

Without question, the notion of the doctor as a legitimate fee-for-service entrepreneur, making his fortune from misfortunes of his patients, is old-fashioned, distasteful, and doomed.

The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people.