In an era of unprecedented medical innovation, we have to do more to ensure that patients facing terminal illnesses have access to potentially life-saving treatments.
We tend not to use the biggest resource in healthcare - the patients themselves. So I'm trying to figure out possible uses for digital technologies like Facebook but also real-life social networks to improve healthcare provision.
I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.
Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.
Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.
Bringing together the unique expertise of researchers from both NYU and the Technion will hopefully enable us to overcome some of the most difficult challenges in treating cancer patients.
The artificial heart is very effective as a bridge to transplant, but the number of people that can be saved with human hearts is limited. A perfect artificial heart could save many more patients.
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.
There is survival behavior, and doctors need to learn from patients who do not die when they are supposed to, instead of saying, 'You're doing very well, so keep doing whatever you are doing.' They should be asking what their patient is doing and pass the information to other patients.
Patients' lives are more important than embryos. I do want to avoid the use of embryos if possible.
Underperforming hospitals or units should accept that they have to improve the service they offer or that patients, quite properly, will go elsewhere.
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
PubMed Central is vital for researchers and the public alike. Only through free access can everyone find out where the cutting edge of research lies. With access to the latest studies, patients and their families have a much-needed piece of the puzzle as they consider treatment options and potential outcomes.
These core principles - helping patients, preventing medical errors, promoting best practices and improving quality - are the reasons that health IT is featured in both the 2012 Republican platform and 2012 Democratic platform.
Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.
I understand what it's like to go to hospitals and there's no medicine, and the best thing you have to give the patients is compassion.
The five patients in 'Rethinking Cancer' share with us the path of their recovery: the courage to take their own lives in their hands with a natural approach to healing their bodies.
Medicines are unusual commodities. Important drugs can save the lives and protect the health of millions. Their consumption can bring huge benefits, by helping patients to avoid infection and preventing serious damage to the economies of families, nations and even humanity at large.
I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.
Our interaction as patients with the NHS should be on the basis that there's a presumption that all information is shared with us.
Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.
That made me think I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time.
Editors and their authors seldom form deep friendships for the same reason that psychiatrists and their patients keep their distance: The relationship requires candor that mixes poorly with intimacy.
