Jeffrey Kluger Quotes

Even top caliber hospitals cannot escape medical mistakes that sometimes result in irreparable damage to patients.

If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.

I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.

I think we are faced in medicine with the reality that we have to be willing to talk about our failures and think hard about them, even despite the malpractice system. I mean, there are things that we can do to make that system better.

We strive for error-free medicine in a world that is sometimes all too human.

The blunders of a doctor are felt not by himself but by others.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

There is alas no law against incompetency; no striking example is made. They learn by our bodily jeopardy and make experiments until the death of the patients, and the doctor is the only person not punished for murder.

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

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

The punishment should fit the crime and if a doctor or drug company does harm knowingly or negligently to a patient they should be compensated to make them whole.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to.

In medicine, all over the world, there are always going to be mistakes made.

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

There is no shortage of embarrassing facts about healthcare, and people die every day in the U.S. due to preventable errors - would you fly planes if you knew several of them would drop out of the sky every day?

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

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

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.

The treatment of patients with contaminated blood has been described as one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the NHS.

Clearly, products for women are not as well scrutinized as products for men. It appears they never tested the implants in breast tissue and that they received decades of complaints from women. It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to scream!

Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.

The doctors must tell you that one of the risks of surgery is that you might die. This poor doctor was talking to an actress. It was very dramatic to me. To him, it was just a thing he had to say.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

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