Clinical Judgment Quotes

The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering.

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

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.

Though fancy may be the patient's complaint, necessity is often the doctor's.

It is true that some off-label drug use is based on very unsettled science and has more risks. But medicine - and not just cancer care - involves lots of hard choices. And the more serious the disorder, often the more likely it is that for every right and wrong treatment choice there are many other practical decisions painted in shades of gray.

The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.

The best surgeon, like best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.

Placing too much emphasis on a yes/no diagnosis, meaning you either have a disease or you don't, can lead even the most well-meaning physicians to miss underlying causes and early warning signs of illness.

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write.

The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe - how to observe - what symptoms indicate improvement - what the reverse - which are of importance - which are of none - which are the evidence of neglect - and of what kind of neglect.

I think people need to be comfortable questioning the authority of a doctor.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.

What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.

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.

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.

What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

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