Healthcare Communication Quotes

I never - I mean, I never saw any doctor's report saying I was HIV positive. I never had a doctor explain to me and show me what was going on.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.

A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.

We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.

Any patient who has a serious illness requiring multiple doctors understands the frustration of lost medical charts, repeated procedures, or having to share the same information over and over with different doctors and nurses.

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

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.

I got a postcard from my gynecologist. It said, Did you know it's time for your annual check-up? No, but now my mailman does.

There's such a void in the medical system. When my husband was sick, it became very apparent to me that the nurses were doing the doctor's job, and the doctors were doing the disease job, so no one was caring for the patient and the loved one.

The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him.

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

If you don't feel well, tell your doctor, but not the marketplace.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.

Is there a medical rule that requires doctors-office personnel to treat you as though you have the IQ of a Cheeto?

I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also spoke with scores of physicians, and especially geriatricians, palliative care doctors, hospice nurses, and nursing home workers. The biggest thing I found was that when these clinicians were at their best, they were recognizing that people had priorities besides merely living longer. The most important and reliable way that we can understand what people's priorities are, besides just living longer, is to simply ask. And we don't ask.

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

You can educate people about politics, criminality, the law, but not about medicine? It's just silly.... I really don't want to hurt anybody, but to say the truth and to offer words that might be helpful in understanding what some of these conditions are. I can't see any reason not to do that. That's changing things for the better.