Patient Care Quotes

“It’s true that AI can mimic the human brain, but it can also outperform us mere humans by discovering complex patterns that no human being could ever process and identify.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“Contrary to the pandemonium that characterised the rest of her life, she was typically cautious with healing, and her years in the infirmary had only made her more careful. It was a responsibility and a privilege to be entrusted with a patient's life, not a thing she took lightly.”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The Empire of Gold

“What these older physicians exhibited is termed clinical curiosity. They stroke to understand their patients in order to elucidate the underlying medical conditions. This thoroughness, patience, and dogged curiosity may have been ingrained in them because they trained at a time when they were no rapid CTs or MRIs. But even now, when these diagnostic tools are at their fingertips, these physicians maintain this approach to patients, one that serves to appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each patient and his or her illness.”
― Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

“The nurse read them again. This time, I wrote them down. Then I spent a minute studying them. She was afebrile, I noted. That was good. Her heart rated was 96, a high number I had no idea how to interpret. Her blood pressure was 152 over 84, another highish set of numbers that told me nothing. Her respiratory rate was 26 - also high, and vaguely disquieting. Her O2 sat - the oxygen content of her blood - was 92 percent: low, and in the context of that high respiratory rate not a good sign. The nurse was still looking at me. "I hear she's a whiner," I said hopefully. The nurse shrugged. "She asked me to call you.”
― Terrence Holt, Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

“Using this technique, Baum et al constructed a forest that contained 1,000 decision trees and looked at 84 co-variates that may have been influencing patients' response or lack of response to the intensive lifestyle modifications program. These variables included a family history of diabetes, muscle cramps in legs and feet, a history of emphysema, kidney disease, amputation, dry skin, loud snoring, marital status, social functioning, hemoglobin A1c, self-reported health, and numerous other characteristics that researchers rarely if ever consider when doing a subgroup analysis. The random forest analysis also allowed the investigators to look at how numerous variables *interact* in multiple combinations to impact clinical outcomes. The Look AHEAD subgroup analyses looked at only 3 possible variables and only one at a time.

In the final analysis, Baum et al. discovered that intensive lifestyle modification averted cardiovascular events for two subgroups, patients with HbA1c 6.8% or higher (poorly managed diabetes) and patients with well-controlled diabetes (Hba1c < 6.8%) and good self-reported health. That finding applied to 85% of the entire patient population studied. On the other hand, the remaining 15% who had controlled diabetes but poor self-reported general health responded negatively to the lifestyle modification regimen. The negative and positive responders cancelled each other out in the initial statistical analysis, falsely concluding that lifestyle modification was useless. The Baum et al. re-analysis lends further support to the belief that a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine is inadequate to address all the individualistic responses that patients have to treatment. ”
― Paul Cerrato, Reinventing Clinical Decision Support: Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Diagnostic Reasoning

“One of the most important skills in my profession is prognosis, the prediction of what will happen to a patient going forward.”
― David Biro, This Magnificent Dappled Sea

“The Waiting Room by Stewart Stafford

The waiting room lay empty,
Gloom-prowled, leather-studded seats,
A ceiling fan spun lonely circles above,
Keeping no one in particular cool at all.

Portrait of a rose in a shadowy alcove,
A pair of empty street scenes framed,
Mirroring the deserted room where they hung,
Creating the vacuum of an infinity void.

A wreath of hope on the door,
The first patient of the day lumbers in,
Where there's one, there'll be others,
Smiles from all at the start of the day.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Patientcare is our national anthem.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Smile Before Pills (Sonnet 1402)

The only permanence we have is each other,
The only paradise we have is each other.
Heaven is as real as we are to each other,
Most potent medicine we have is each other.

One moment of love is time eternal,
100 years of hate are but ghost of wild past.
One rebellion of love is destiny in making,
100 rituals of hate are just monkeys' mass.

A smile works faster than a pill,
both metaphorically and physiologically.
Pills take hours to reach your bloodstream, while
a smile triggers instant release of neurochemicals,
which alleviates pain and facilitates immunity.

Sure, pills and prescriptions are a scientific boon,
They achieve wonders where organic powers fall short.
Yet, there is no prescription for a mannerless medico,
There is no pharmaceutical cure for a medical upstart.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“You can make an appointment with a bad doctor only on a stretcher.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov