Medical Judgment Quotes

The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering.

The patient's autonomy always, always should be respected, even if it is absolutely contrary - the decision is contrary to best medical advice and what the physician wants.

When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.

I'm one of the few candidates that actually goes out and talks in public, so I say a lot of things based on my experience, my judgment as an environmental health physician, so I say a lot of stuff.

The physician cannot prescribe by letter, he must feel the pulse.

You can't judge the ability of a doctor by the amount of praise the undertakers give him.

Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.

You cannot look at someone and say they are unhealthy. You are not a doctor, and if you were, you'd realize why that's silly.

Obviously it's always hard when you tell a patient you can't help them, because maybe it's a physical constraint with the surgery, but in regards to telling a patient that they're not realistic and they're not appropriate psychological candidates, we're pretty used to it.

I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated all my homosexual patients are quite sick - to which I finally replied so are all my heterosexual patients.

Some persons will tell you, with an air of the miraculous, that they recovered although they were given over; whereas they might with more reason have said, they recovered because they were given over.

A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

Good doctors exercise judgment. They make the call and - right or wrong - live with the consequences and learn from them. The redefined M.D. is flawed, but comfortable inside their own skin.

People think you go to doctors for their knowledge. You don't go to doctors for their knowledge. You go to doctors for their judgment, their instinct, what to do, how to make the right call.

To make a coverage decision, doesn't one have to make a medical judgment?

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

It's in poor taste to question anyone's illness diagnosed through specific testing by their doctor.

It is incident to physicians, I am afraid, beyond all other men, to mistake subsequence for consequence.