Neal Barnard Quotes

My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?

I'm a physician first and foremost. I will always be a physician.

Whether it's possible or not, being a doctor, you take an oath. To care for your patient, not to kill them. You take an oath to do things that are proper in the medical world. Not to administer something outside of a hospital setting that's not even your area.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

I think being a doctor is really hard, and it's really this thankless, never-ending job. It's not even that you get done with a project. There are always sick people.

It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption.

Doctors are busy playing God when so few of us have the qualifications. And besides, the job is taken.

I'm a medical doctor by training. I'm a physician, not a politician. And I'm in this as a mother on fire.

It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

Doctors have an ethical duty to follow the practices and standards of care.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.

When I took the Hippocratic oath and was effectively 'sworn in' as a doctor, I took the same vow that doctors have taken for generations. Patient autonomy is core to this oath.

… we are merely the servants of the public, in spite of our M.d. ’s and our hospital appointments

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

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.

We are trained to be medical doctors first and if you have to put neurosurgery aside to deal with the most vulnerable and susceptible patients, then that's what we'll do.

For me, it's always better to tell people the truth, because people can accept the truth.

My childhood best friend is an anesthesiologist. It's the least amount of human interaction for a doctor. I don't think you can get that burned out on it.

You needn't think there is nothing you can do-you can tell the truth.

Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public, not designers or clients. 'Do no harm' is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

I find medicine is the best of all trades because whether you do any good or not you still. Get your money.