Medical Reality Quotes

Though fancy may be the patient's complaint, necessity is often the doctor's.

'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'

In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.

Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

My father once discovered that one cannot "walk off" gangrene.

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back in the shell.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

If you have depression, you are dramatically more likely to be sick. Now to say you don't need to treat depression because it's not a medical reality - when in fact it clearly affects your interaction with the entire world around you - is just frankly reactionary.