Medical Decision Making Quotes

We are not going back. We are not returning to the days of back-room abortions, when countless women died or were maimed. The decision about abortion must remain a decision for the woman, her family and a physician to make, not the government.

Present law has a process to ascertain whether or not a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, and it should not matter what politicians think.

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

When doctors differ who decides amid the milliard-headed throng?

What Republicans want to do is to put doctors and patients and patients' families back in charge of people's health care rather than having pencil pushers of the government or in some insurance office doing that job.

Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

I want to move people to think and ponder the question of their own healthcare. And it doesn't need to be political thinking.

Why do physicians prescribe powerful antibiotics? Generally not because our patients ask for them. Most people who come in with a sore throat would be just as happy leaving my office with a prescription for Chloraseptic as clarithromycin.

One of the reasons surgeons have so much trouble separating Siamese twins is that nobody gets to do many of them. On the table, the anatomy is so different from normal, that you're constantly trying to figure out, 'Can I cut this? Does this wire lead to what?' It's like trying to defuse a bomb.

After my cancer diagnosis this year, I was offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I not used the stolen material provided by Sci-Hub, it would have cost me thousands.

If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

People and organizations other than doctors increasingly are assuming power to decide which medications to prescribe or procedures to undertake. More and more, decisions about personal healthcare are no longer made by the treating physicians in consultation with their patients, and based on the doctors' expertise.

Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and, therefore, less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.

I think people need to be comfortable questioning the authority of a doctor.

President Obama says he will not support a healthcare plan where the government gets to decide whether to, quote, 'pull the plug on Grandma.' Apparently, Obama's plan calls for the much quicker pillow option.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident?

Before operating on a patient's brain... I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.

...the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness must be preserved.

The whole point of getting control of health is to regulate everybody's life and look at how they decide now whether somebody should get treated or not: age, how sick are you, how much it's going to cost to invest in your recovery and are you going to recover. And when the government is in charge of making those decisions and not you and your doctor.

I'm not the typical doctor that gives patients what they want. I don't do that. I try to give them what I want as long as they're okay with that. I know what's going to match their face.

In the early stages of a pregnancy, the Government cannot intervene with a woman's right to choose. That is it, plain and simple. Guess what. We are not going to be big brother or sister, as the case may be. We are going to allow a woman, her doctor, and her God to make that decision.

What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.