Paul Nassif Quotes

A Patients' Bill of Rights is at the center of our national existence.

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

Nursing demands vigilance about people. The sights and smells that a patient offers, their movements and their offhand comments all contribute crucial information to understanding what they need. Training and experience heighten one's ability to see what needs to be seen.

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.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

No doctor should ever have to call an insurance man to ask permission to treat a patient who is standing right there.

We must always make sure that our doctors work for their patients and not for the government

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

… we are merely the servants of the public, in spite of our M.d. ’s and our hospital appointments

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.

As a clinician, I would never want to be coercive in relation to a patient, nor do I harbor the illusion that as a physician I am capable of forcing someone to change their behavior, no matter how detrimental to their health.

I'm opposed to anybody getting between me and the patient.

I've never gone and spoken to an audience, you know, 'come and be my patient.' I've never taken an ad in a newspaper, 'come and be my patient.'

Luckily for me, I don't depend on seeing every patient who comes through my door to pay the rent, and so if someone is involved in an activity that I don't like, I just don't accept that person as a client.

The consumer is really underutilized in health care.

It's hard to be a good doctor if you don't think about the social circumstances of who you're treating. There are many Tory doctors, but I think it's difficult to be a doctor and a genuine right-winger.

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.

The last time I was in there to set up for a surgery, I was sitting in the waiting room ... watching television. And a special came on the news about a guy who got AIDS from re-used medical equipment in the VA. It was the same procedure I was fixing to get. I'm gone. Deuces. I walked out, man.

With 'Cardiac Arrest,' I wanted to show that there were times when doctors really didn't care.

We are trained to be medical doctors first and if you have to put neurosurgery aside to deal with the most vulnerable and susceptible patients, then that's what we'll do.

Communication is everything, especially as a doctor, you need to communicate with your patients.

I was always taught at medical school that you should never do a test unless you could do something with the result.

I'm not the typical doctor that gives patients what they want. I don't do that. I try to give them what I want as long as they're okay with that. I know what's going to match their face.