Patients Quotes
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We should listen less to the opinions of those who either overtly promote or stubbornly reject complementary and alternative medicine without acceptable evidence. The many patients who use complementary and alternative medicine deserve better. Patients and healthcare providers need to know which forms are safe and effective. Its future should (and hopefully will) be determined by unbiased scientific evaluation.
Edzard Ernst
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I have met countless patients who told me that they “are” bipolar or borderline or that they “have” PTSD, as if they had been sentenced to remain in an underground dungeon for the rest of their lives, like the Count of Monte Cristo. None of these diagnoses takes into account the unusual talents that many of our patients develop or the creative energies they have mustered to survive.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them—and from our own experience.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
Bernard Berenson
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My patients are people who live on the edge of survival and beyond.
Ben Sherwood
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Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. One of my patients told me, ‘It is like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs.’ Nothing feels safe – least of all your own body.
Bessel van der Kolk
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You wouldn't believe how many FDA officials or relatives or acquaintances of FDA officials come to see me as patients in Hanover. You wouldn't believe this, or directors of the AMA, or ACA, or the presidents of orthodox cancer institutes.
Hans Alfred Nieper
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These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
Sigmund Freud
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He says not to list the patients we save but the ones we don't kill.
Barbara Wood
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The patients often try to starve themselves, to hang themselves, to cut their arteries; they beg that they may be burned, buried alive, driven out into the woods and there allowed to die. One of my patients struck his neck so often on the edge of a chisel fixed on the ground that all the soft parts were cut through to the vertebrae.
Emil Kraepelin
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I'm not sure what Essiac does to extend cancer survival, and for all we know it may not have this effect. On the other hand, it's not toxic and my patients have reported feeling good while taking it, so why not support them?
Abram Hoffer
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The system is broken. The doctors and the nurses can't do everything. The patients need human attention; the patients themselves need to be addressed, rather than just their disease.
Colleen Saidman
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The goal of the research on my ward was to determine whether psychotherapy or medication was the best way to treat young people who had suffered a first mental breakdown diagnosed as schizophrenia. The talking cure, an offshoot of Freudian psychoanalysis, was still the primary treatment for mental illness at MMHC. However, in the early 1950s a group of French scientists had discovered a new compound, chlorpromazine (sold under the brand name Thorazine), that could “tranquilize” patients and make them less agitated and delusional. That inspired hope that drugs could be developed to treat serious mental problems such as depression, panic, anxiety, and mania, as well as to manage some of the most disturbing symptoms of schizophrenia.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The best practitioners give to their patients the least medicine.
Arthur Frederick Saunders
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Because most of these patients suffered from alexithymia, it was not easy for them to report their response to the treatments. But their actions spoke for them: They consistently showed up on time for their appointments, even if they had to drive through snowstorms. None of them dropped out, and at the end of the full twenty sessions, we could document significant improvements not only in their PTSD scores, but also in their interpersonal comfort, emotional balance, and self-awareness. They were less frantic, they slept better, and they felt calmer and more focused. In any case, self-reports can be unreliable; objective changes in behavior are much better indicators of how well treatment works.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Six patients with advanced cancer were treated with amygdalin at dosages similar to those employed by Laetrile practitioners....intravenously... (and) orally...No clinical or lab evidence of toxic reaction was seen (by us).
Charles Moertel
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I tell patients that tranquilizers alone never cure anyone. They merely reduce the intensity of the symptoms and make life slightly more endurable. They create a better behaved, chronic dependent person. Only with orthomolecular treatment can the majority of schizophrenic patients hope to become well and normally independent.
Abram Hoffer
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You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal.
Armand Trousseau
