doctor

The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle.

Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal.

This boy was likely to die soon, but he died yesterday - because of a doctor's arrogance, his unwillingness to seek a consult, his neglect to get a full and thorough history. Arrogance! We are clinicians, scientists. We observe time-honored procedures and analyses - that's how we are trained. And this is what happens when we subjugate that training to arrogance!

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it__ important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It__ a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

Medicine no doubt, has helped us a lot to cure so many diseases, but death still remains an incurable one!

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field__nternal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.

Doctors are allowed to practice medicine. What are you called when you are not practicing any more and finally know what your doing?

The story was an 82 year old guy with a broken neck. He had apparently fallen in his bathroom that morning, cracking his 1st and 2nd vertebrae. I had a vague memory from medical school that this wasn't a good thing--the expression "hangman's fracture" kept bobbing up from the well of facts I do not use --but I had a much more distinct impression that this was not a case for cardiology."And Ortho isn't taking him because?" I said wearily."Because he's got internal organs, dude."I sighed. "So why me?""Because they got an EKG."The MAO was clearly enjoying himself. I remembered he had recently been accepted to a cardiology fellowship. I braced myself for the punch line."And?""And there's ectopy on it. Ectopy." He then made a noise intended to suggest a ghost haunting something.

We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succesion. THESE ARE OUR METHODS - to carefully observe the phenomena of life in all its stages , to cultivate reasoning faculty so as to be able to know the true from the false. THIS IS OUR WORK - to prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick.

A doctor's mission should not be to prevent death, but more importantly it should be to improve the quality of life.

There is an art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon__ knife

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.

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.

Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.

Bow ties are cool.