Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don’t have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it’s a very difficult conversation. It’s emotionally draining.
There was never a need to call the Army in Mumbai. I am proud of the administration which rose to the challenge and set up jumbo field hospitals for treatment of coronavirus patients in the city.
My commitment to human rights has always been the core of my work in Congress, as I am legislating for those unhoused, for those protesters often criminalized for their beliefs, and for those patients in need of universal care.
There are no bona fide treatments available for embryonic stem cells. There is nothing in the laboratory, and there is certainly nothing in the clinics available to patients.
As a small-business owner who kept costs low and health care premiums flat for 10 years in my company, I know firsthand that transparency is the trick to reducing the skyrocketing health care costs that are burdening patients, employers, and our state, local, and federal governments.
Patients who face long odds and terminal illnesses do not always have access to the latest drugs in clinical trials. They don’t want to give up, but they don’t have years to wait for new drugs to receive FDA approval.
I was drawn to medicine because I’m fond of serving. In college, we go to the orphanage every week, see patients first-hand.
The five patients in ‘Rethinking Cancer’ share with us the path of their recovery: the courage to take their own lives in their hands with a natural approach to healing their bodies.
Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can’t get medical care or clean water.
There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures.
Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn’t trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.
We can bring health care back to the states and bring power back to patients. I think of that commercial from 1984 when Apple took a hammer and broke the screen.
Value in medicine depends on information – as I said in ‘Let Patients Help,’ ‘People perform better when they’re informed better.’ It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.
Nurses serve their patients in the most important capacities. We know that they serve as our first lines of communication when something goes wrong or when we are concerned about health.
The more I removed vegetables that have lots of seeds, such as cucumbers and squash, the better my patients felt, the more weight they lost, and the more their cholesterol levels improved.
What we’re really trying to do is level out the health care system. It has gotten so one-sided as more and more people have been put into managed care; in fact, about 70 percent of the patients in the country.
Bringing together the unique expertise of researchers from both NYU and the Technion will hopefully enable us to overcome some of the most difficult challenges in treating cancer patients.
Whether we’re too embarrassed or shy – or worried that a discussion about cost might affect the quality of our care – it’s clear that both doctors and patients need to do more communicating.
But I like it when my patients are impressed not knowing that I was an Olympian.
Like a lot of other cancer patients lying in hospital beds or in chemotherapy suites, I have spent a fair amount of time fantasizing about jetting off to a tropical island.
Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.
Patients who trust their doctors and have a psychological expectation of getting better could trigger a reaction in their body.
The interesting thing about the miracle berry in chemo patients is that it actually straightens out their taste buds, whereas for you and I, it blocks our bitter and sour receptors. For them, it straightens them out to taste food as it normally tastes.
My choice of learning pharmacy was driven by my interests, curiosity, and a desire to seek new medicines for patients.
The bulk of my learning – if I may call it such – has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.
I have had patients die because of lack of insurance.
I think, in picking a doctor, you should focus less on the degree and more on their knowledge, bedside manner, communication, and patients’ experiences.
Healthcare providers will compete to offer the best record of patient safety at the lowest prices. Hospitals and patients will benefit from having accurate information about areas of excellence and areas that must be improved.
When you have multiple patients on life support, you don’t pull the plug on one just to save another.
I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn’t tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.
Certain types of cancer patients are finally being cured thanks to immunotherapy.
Adult stem cells have shown great potential and have effectively helped patients. Another alternative is cord-blood stem cells. These are a neglected resource that could be used to treat a diverse body of people.
In the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there is widespread access to dialysis, most of it publicly funded. But in many countries, the majority of patients who need dialysis die without it.
I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief.
They can become very irritated. They can become very aggressive. Not all Alzheimer’s patients are that way, but many are. My mother was very difficult. She had extreme mood changes and would become fearful.
Hospitals should be paid to keep patients out of the hospital, not for signing up more and more patients.
The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.
There is survival behavior, and doctors need to learn from patients who do not die when they are supposed to, instead of saying, ‘You’re doing very well, so keep doing whatever you are doing.’ They should be asking what their patient is doing and pass the information to other patients.
At the age of 16, my father’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. And I think it changed the course of his life, and he became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients.
We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.
I initially became a trainer in 2002 to help people shape their bodies, to help them look the way they wanted to look. This would reflect the way I was living. I was focusing on the exterior. Then in 2003/4, I had a paradigm shift. I started a business for bariatric patients, pre- and post-gastric bypass.
We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
Residents of my district continue to stress to me that they want health care decisions to be made by patients and doctors, not by the government and insurance companies.
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.
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Not much shocked me. You know, I worked in a home for Alzheimer’s patients and my dad used to be really into murders and stuff, so I saw dead bodies. It desensitised me to a lot of things.
When medical students focus on helping others, they’re able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.
I was a very efficient doctor. I would get rewarded with a lot more patients. By the end of my medical career, I had maybe 2,000 patients in my practice.
It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.
