Patient Understanding Quotes

With Alzheimer's patients, you have to be very careful what you say when you're looking at them over their bed. Because once in a while, they understand it.

It's just hard to look at yourself and guess how you're going to be perceived by other people sometimes. I do my best to let people know that I'm approachable, but I'm a human being just like anybody else. Sometimes people forget that. They forget that you're a person and they treat you like this celebrity thing. But I have to be patient with that, and I try to be.

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can't do that if you don't really understand why you're getting certain tests done and when you don't know what the results mean when you get them back.

There are no "facts"- there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

Too many radiologists still believe there is a risk from a chest x-ray. Few radiologists can explain radiation to the patient in words the patient can understand.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

When you have a stroke, you must talk slowly to be understood, and I've discovered that when I talk slowly, people listen. They think I'm going to say something important!

As a physician, I understand how important it is to collect data on people so we can understand what's happening with them. I will be in the position to help enable that knowledge.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

We have to rethink, how do we get a complete 360-degree understanding of the patient?

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

When we have laws that compartmentalize medical information, and when we have paper systems that compartmentalize medical information, you sometimes have a doctor who understands his specialty and is terrific on your kidneys, but he doesn't understand the totality of who you are.

I wanted to show people that doctors are humans, too. It's important for us to be around other people - that way, we can understand our patients better rather than just walking into a room, barking orders, and walking out.

The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience.

He was a patient with a diagnosis that he couldn't understand.

People tell you you're having chemotherapy, but there are different types of chemotherapy, and you don't know which one you're going to get and how it's going to affect you. The people in the hospitals don't always have time to help you understand it.

The pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school-tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success--all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way.