The fact is, many poor patients visit ERs simply because they don’t have a family doctor.
Meaningful health reform needs to provide incentives for physicians and other health professionals to teach their patients healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing primarily drugs and surgical interventions.
Reducing MRSA infections is critical because these bacteria are difficult to treat and are common in healthcare settings, especially among ICU (intensive care unit) patients.
Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.
Providing patients and consumers with solid information on the cost and quality of their healthcare options can literally make the difference between life or death; and play a decisive role in whether a family or employer can afford healthcare.
We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.
The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.
My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.
By offering individuals ownership and control of their health care coverage, we return control to the patients; and that is exactly where it should be.
Perhaps 10 percent of patients who are prescribed antidepressants are really benefiting from the drugs’ active ingredients.
Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they’re better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn’t work that way.
Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life… Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.
For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn’t for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.
I would like the Medical Society to be one of the resources for information about the influences that have an impact on our patients and our practices.
If we can validate our scientific bets in the clinic, if we can bring valuable new treatments to patients that need them, that will be our ultimate measure of success.
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.
I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them.
Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.
Lets take away the incentives to do ‘to’ patients and instead create incentives to do ‘for’ patients, to be ‘with’ patients. We don’t need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.
More than half of the complaints that patients bring to their doctors are emotional in origin. Most often, they include troubled or absent connections with loved ones.
When we harness the ability to turn connections into data and then into knowledge, we can empower citizens, patients, and professionals to prevent disease, avoid or better manage health crises, and even save lives.
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
Many of us are alarmed at the skyrocketing cost of medical care, including patients, who are the consumers. However, medical malpractice is not the reason for these increasing costs.
Meeting forensic patients for the first time could occasionally be an unnerving experience. They often came across as mild and gentle people, but the details of the crimes were harrowing in the extreme.
We sometimes think that the best doctors are the ones who have the most specialized knowledge or the fanciest degrees, but in fact, study upon study, including one published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine,’ show that the best doctors are the ones who also know how to connect with their patients.
For patients to be safe, we need doctors to be able to reflect completely openly and freely about what they have done, to learn from mistakes, to spread best practice around the system, to talk openly with their colleagues.
There’s some experiences you can’t get in Congress. You don’t learn what it’s like to turn patients away because they’re uninsured, or be passed over in the waiting room because you’re on Medicaid.
As a doctor who took care of patients for 25 years, I saw the problems with America’s health care system every day.
In a majority of hospitals, in a majority of places, it is the nurses that are on the frontlines. They’re the ones working every moment with the patients to ensure that they do well.
I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her life. She was in a nursing facility in my little hometown area of northern Illinois, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the disease. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a pretty big way.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Crohn’s patients differentiate their diet. You know, what I can handle and tolerate, another person couldn’t, and what they can, I can’t.
By keeping my hand in that, it’s the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.
Patients are becoming aware that they’re being taken for a ride by big pharma companies. They charge high prices and have never cared for India’s healthcare. There are 23 million cases of cancer every year and India has a fair share of that.
You know, cancer is bipartisan. I mean, there are so many people whose lives are touched and changed by cancer that people are willing to work together to find cures, find solutions, make lives better for cancer patients. So I think people put politics aside. This isn’t a political thing. This is a life issue.
These core principles – helping patients, preventing medical errors, promoting best practices and improving quality – are the reasons that health IT is featured in both the 2012 Republican platform and 2012 Democratic platform.
If, over time, patients don’t go to some services, then progressively they become less viable, so you do arrive at a point where the conclusion is: ‘These are the right services for the future, and this is capacity we don’t need.’
It’s like doctors can’t save all their patients, but, on balance, Bain under Gov. Romney created well over 100,000 jobs, which is certainly more than has been created in the Obama administration because we’re down over 500,000 over the last three-and-a-half years.
Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
I hear from patients who say their doctor said, ‘If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won’t harm you, and it may do you some good.’ More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.
One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn’t be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn’t have to operate on them in the first place!
For-profit does not belong in a taxpayer-funded health system. For-profit means cutting medical services to patients, and payments to providers, to preserve profits.
I want to see far more decisions taken far closer to the patients, the passengers and the pupils. Far more power for locally and regionally elected politicians who understand best the needs of their areas. And far more say too for the dedicated staff at all levels in health and education.
The Patients’ Bill of Rights is necessary to guarantee that health care will be available for those who are paying for insurance. It’s a part of the overall health care picture.
If we are going to keep patients safe, then we have to make sure that doctors are able to learn from mistakes.
Patient transfer service is another revolutionary step of the Punjab government, under which patients from tehsil headquarters hospitals and district headquarters hospitals are being shifted to large hospitals free of cost.
When patients reject official advice and proved medicine, they become more susceptible to quackery.
L.A. – talk about a cruel city: Patients are forcibly removed from hospitals.
In an era of unprecedented medical innovation, we have to do more to ensure that patients facing terminal illnesses have access to potentially life-saving treatments.
In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.
