Medical Understanding Quotes

Any man who is intelligent must, on considering that health is of the utmost value to human beings, have the personal understanding necessary to help himself in diseases, and be able to understand and to judge what physicians say and what they administer to his body, being versed in each of these matters to a degree reasonable for a layman.

It's far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.

The cure of many diseases is unknown to physicians because they are ignorant of the whole... For the part can never be well unless the whole is well.

Patients know what patients want to know.

It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

After I read all the medical journals and watched all the documentaries, I still didn't understand the physical sensation of ticking and where it comes from and what it feels like.

Disease [is] as one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

Saving Milly was a break from this effort because I felt that it was time to be part of something that could shed light on a disease everyone feels they know, when most know so little.

We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. Nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to bring back the state of health. It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of functions as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs.

Most people assume that physician language is akin to technical, non-understandable jargon. It does not have to be that way. Doctors do not perform witchcraft. They simply interpret what they are told and what tests reveal. They diagnose and prescribe treatment. Our responsibility is to help doctors know what is going on in our bodies and to insist on clear, precise, understandable language in response.

Sjogren's is something you live with your whole life. The good news for me is now I know what's happening after spending years not knowing... I feel like I can get better and move on.

When I began my practice, I said I'm going to be a pediatrician that really thinks about and understands a child's educational trajectory.

The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

I spent three months with a physical therapist understanding what a stroke is. I asked, 'What is a stroke?' I didn't really know. It's okay to mimic something, but I really needed to understand the signs.

A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.

Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don't know a lot about what it feels like from their side.

The brain is a body part too; we just know less about it.

The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart.