Clinical Uncertainty Quotes

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

It is very difficult to clinically diagnose someone who is dead.

To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.

We must always remember that all medical interventions have risk, and very little can be asserted with 100 percent certainty.

If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

When you're trained in medicine and it's the '80s and you've got all this hi-tech stuff and this ability to diagnose everything, when you not only couldn't make a diagnosis, you didn't know what the problem was, and you didn't know how to treat it, it was devastating.