I am a spiritual person. I'm a Catholic. I treat my patients, the dead patients, as live patients. I believe there is life after death. And I talk to my patients. I talk to them, not loudly but quietly in my heart when I look at them. Before I do an autopsy, I must have a visual contact with the face.
Patients want to be seen as people. For me, the person's life comes first; the disease is simply one aspect of it, which I can guide my patients to use as a redirection in their lives. When doctors look at their patients, however, they are trained to see only the disease.
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.
Whenever you see shrinks on television, they're so clearly written by patients. They're either idealized or they're demonized or they love their patients. All they ever think about is their patients.
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.
There are several patients - there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson's disease.
I wasn't afraid of treating Ebola patients in the isolation unit. That was the safest job. But seeing patients in the clinic, seeing patients in the emergency room, being in the community - those things gave me pause.
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. So, in fact, the gamut of medical intervention is enormous.
Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.
Under Obamacare - which placed 159 federal agencies, commissions, and bureaucracies between patients and doctors - patients not only face dramatically higher health care costs, they've also lost the power to choose the options right for them.
Patients are patients because they are out of rapport with their own unconscious... Patients are people who have had too much programming - so much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves.
I've seen so many patients, particularly elderly patients, over the years who become debilitated and changed by the process by which I cure them or another doctor cures them. And has it really been worth it?
The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's. But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients.
I had the opportunity of making necropsies on patients dead from malignant fever and of studying the melanaemia, i.e., the formation of black pigment in the blood of patients affected by malaria.
Ventilators can be reused but hospitals need a sufficient supply to treat critically ill patients while still allowing enough time for each ventilator to be refurbished between patients.
I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated all my homosexual patients are quite sick - to which I finally replied so are all my heterosexual patients.
But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people's lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me.