Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
We run after values that, at death, become zero. At the end of your life, nobody asks you how many degrees you have, or how many mansions you built, or how many Rolls Royces you could afford. That's what dying patients teach you.
We start with people who are motivated to get paid and be on TV, and we end up with people who have been transformed by the experience and go on to embrace sobriety. If they relapse, like most of my patients do, we continue to support and treat them. I'm thrilled that five out the eight [Celebrity Rehab cast members] showed up for after-care, and two more committed to coming back.
Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.
Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.
I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not treating patients.
A lot of patients you know if you haven't seen them for 6 months or a year, you won't remember what medicines they're on or what kind of problems they have. And you know I'd feel much better if I know a little bit about the patient before I walk in the room, so I won't be too surprised.
For sure, to be exact, one seventh of my patients never graduated my program.
I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.
I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.
It is ironic that in the same year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, some would have us ban certain forms of DNA medical research. Restricting medical research has very real human consequences, measured in loss of life and tremendous suffering for patients and their families.
Many patients cannot hear until they feel heard.
I think that the marriage of academic medical centers and academicians with the private sector is a very, is a marriage made in heaven because it's the best way to get basic discoveries from the laboratory into new therapeutics for our patients.
I do believe that, in time, doctors - both alternative and orthodox - will begin using whatever is the highest best treatment for their patients, regardless of the modality.
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.
Few gynecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolpoof of solutions, namely, misterectomy.
Patients have the right to help themselves.
I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes. ' (135)
The work of a psychotherapist involves being empathic and insightful with one's patients without getting too lost in their painful stories to be helpful.