Diagnostic Skills Quotes

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation.

A half-educated physician is not valuable. He thinks he can cure everything.

Every physician must be rich in knowledge, and not only of that which is written in books; his patients should be his book, they will never mislead him.

There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.

Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.

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.

There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.

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

Common sense is in medicine the master workman.

I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all.

We can learn something from every single medical interaction. Every case, every patient has a lesson to teach us.

Correct is to recognize what diseases are and whence they come; which are long and which are short; which are mortal and which are not; which are in the process of changing into others; which are increasing and which are diminishing; which are major and which are minor; to treat the diseases that can be treated, but to recognize the ones that cannot be, and to know why they cannot be; by treating patients with the former, to give them the benefit of treatment as far as it is possible.

I think it's a very valuable thing for a doctor to learn how to do research, to learn how to approach research, something there isn't time to teach them in medical school. They don't really learn how to approach a problem, and yet diagnosis is a problem; and I think that year spent in research is extremely valuable to them.

There was an opening in the ER program at King Drew, so I spent the next month there, fascinated with the range of pathology that I observed, the diversity of skill that the ER physicians had to acquire, the variety of cases, and the ability to interact closely with people.