I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
I've experienced wrong diagnoses and been given antibiotics for things that could be cured naturally. We may not think much of it, but it destroys our immunity.
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.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
For patients to be safe, we need doctors to be able to reflect completely openly and freely about what they have done, to learn from mistakes, to spread best practice around the system, to talk openly with their colleagues.
The Puerto Rican doctor, who wrote all his prescriptions with spray paint. Never got a dinner!
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.
A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
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?
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.
If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.
Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about.
Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.
Here lies the body of my good horse, The General. For years he bore me around the circuit of my practice and all that time he never made a blunder. Would that his master could say the same.
If we are going to keep patients safe, then we have to make sure that doctors are able to learn from mistakes.
We strive for error-free medicine in a world that is sometimes all too human.
Don't ever use duct tape on your privates. That's what I always tell people.
By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve 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.
Top doctors, I have come to believe, are as big a menace to your health as top money managers are to your bank account. They are almost never available to talk to.
