The freedom of patient speech is necessary if the doctor is to get clues about the medical enigma before him. If the patient is inhibited, or cut off prematurely, or constrained into one path of discussion, then the doctor may not be told something vital. Observers have noted that, on average, physicians interrupt patients within eighteen seconds of when they begin telling their story. Jerome Groopman
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who...
-
Mother Teresa
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
-
Chuck Palahniuk
It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family...
-
Mary Roach
The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope...
-
Lance Armstrong
Frostpine made a face. Lifting the cup, he dumped its contents down his throat. “Auugghh! ” he yelled, his voice stronger than it had been since his return from the harbor. "Are you trying to kill me, woman?"" If I mean to kill someone, I...
-
Tamora Pierce
More Quotes By Jerome Groopman
To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen.
Hope can be imagined as a domino effect, a chain reaction, each increment making the next increase more feasible... There are moments of fear and doubt that can deflate it.
I had learned that every patient has the right to hope, despite long odds, and it was my role to help nurture that hope.
... omniscience about life and death is not within a physician's purview. A doctor should never write off a person a priori.
