Patient Perspective Quotes

My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.

I must be the only person in the world who's looking forward to going into hospital. I can't wait to get it over and done with.

Upon hearing the results of her breast examination, the First Lady said - "I guess it's my turn."

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.

Patients know what patients want to know.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role ... in fixing health care.

We are guests in our patients' lives.

I can't talk about - as eloquently as everyone else about a prevention or medicine or, you know, funding, but I can talk about the human element, which is the main part of AIDS, because it comes to the human being and how they are being treated, what medicines they are on and what medicines they are not on.

Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

It doesn't hit you until you pull up to the hospital, and you see 'cancer' in big letters, and you're the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.

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.

You don't know what the real problems of a health care system are until you get sick.

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.

When the doctor said I had diabetes, I conjured images of languishing on a chaise longue nibbling chocolates. I have no idea why I thought this.

Crohn's patients differentiate their diet. You know, what I can handle and tolerate, another person couldn't, and what they can, I can't.

I think 'Red Band Society' is unique because not only is it focusing on a pediatric ward, but it's from the view from the patient, not from the view of the doctors. So we're getting to see a whole other side of hospitals and medical series life that we haven't been able to see before.

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.

It has oft been said that physicians make the worst patients, but it is the opinion of This Author that any man makes a terrible patient. One might say it takes patience to be a patient, and heaven knows, the males of our species lack an abundance of patience.

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like.

Whenever you see shrinks on television, they're so clearly written by patients. They're either idealized or they're demonized or they love their patients. All they ever think about is their patients.

The patient is the nucleus of the health care system.

The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience.