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.
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.
Treating only terminal cancer patients, the Rand (anti-cancer) vaccine produced objective improvement in 35% of 600 patients while another 30% demonstrated subjective improvement. FDA stopped the vaccine's use in a federal court hearing where neither the cancer patients nor their doctors were allowed to testify.
Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'
A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.
The need of an insecure psychiatrist to draw security from a virtuous adjustment to the conventionalities of his time and from a quest for approval from "the good and the great" may turn out to be another agent interfering with his ability to listen in a therapeutically valid fashion. This type of dependence gives rise to the danger that the psychiatrist may consider the changeable man-made standards of the society in which he lives to be eternal values to which he and his patients must conform.
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.
We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.
There are a very small number of doctors in France that use essential oils and herbs as well as conventional drugs in their treatments and sometimes they will use essential oils intensively, usually because they are treating people with cancer or chronic infections that patients have had for years, and ingested essential oils are a really a great choice for treating chronic infections if you're a doctor.
But we have gone so far in the direction of over treating terminal patients that we've failed to recognize when we're doing more harm than good.
Hospitals feel like they need to increase prices to make up for treating patients that don't pay their bills or that are not having insurance supporting them.
Half a psychiatrist's patients see him because they are married - the other half because they're not.
The [Tumor Treating Fields] patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life. There's none of the tiredness. There's none of what is called the 'chemo head.'
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.
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.