Patients Quotes
-
Even traumatized patients who are making real contributions in teaching, business, medicine, or the arts and who are successfully raising their children expend a lot more energy on the everyday tasks of living than do ordinary mortals.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
Images and physical sensations may deluge patients at this point, and the therapist must be familiar with ways to stem torrents of sensation and emotion to prevent them from becoming retraumatized by accessing the past.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated all my homosexual patients are quite sick - to which I finally replied so are all my heterosexual patients.
Ernest Van den Haag
-
I trust I may be enabled in the treatment of patients always to act with a single eye to their good.
Joseph Lister
-
How can people open up to and explore their internal world of sensations and emotions? In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
If patients who present in such dramatically different states are treated as fakes, or if they are told to stop showing their unpredictably annoying parts, they are likely to become mute. They probably will continue to seek help, but after they have been silenced they will transmit their cries for help not by talking but by acting: with suicide attempts, depression, and rage attacks.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
Seeing what was needed in the hospital firsthand - someone needs to come in and just be with patients, without trying to take their blood or change the bedpan, and to give them human-to-human touch.
Colleen Saidman
-
Many of my patients respond to stress not by noticing and naming it but by developing migraine headaches or asthma attacks.15 Sandy, a middle-aged visiting nurse, told me she’d felt terrified and lonely as a child, unseen by her alcoholic parents. She dealt with this by becoming deferential to everybody she depended on (including me, her therapist). Whenever her husband made an insensitive remark, she would come down with an asthma attack.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
Through Heaven's Gate and Back speaks to all of us that have been abused as children. Lee Thornton's descriptions of the aftereffects of repeated trauma and a profound Near-Death Experience (NDE) are not only true but explained in a way that the reader can take in. It is rare to find a book so well written that it has both sexual abuse and an NDE under one cover. We definitely will be recommending this book to our patients.
Charles L. Whitfield
-
Patients deserve increased price transparency and affordable care, particularly as the system shifts significant costs to them.
Heather Bresch
-
Many treatment approaches for traumatic stress focus on desensitizing patients to their past, with the expectation that reexposure to their traumas will reduce emotional outbursts and flashbacks. I believe that this is based on a misunderstanding of what happens in traumatic stress. We must most of all help our patients to live fully and securely in the present. In order to do that, we need to help bring those brain structures that deserted them when they were overwhelmed by trauma back. Desensitization may make you less reactive, but if you cannot feel satisfaction in ordinary everyday things like taking a walk, cooking a meal, or playing with your kids, life will pass you by.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of the seats of diseases, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. How often are we disappointed in our expectation from the most certain and powerful of our remedies, by the negligence or obstinacy of our patients! What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases. We have done more — we have increased their mortality.
Benjamin Rush
-
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.
Brandon Bays
-
This research confirms what our patients tell us: that the self can be detached from the body and live a phantom existence on its own. Similarly, Lanius and Frewen, as well as a group of researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands,26 did brain scans on people who dissociated their terror and found that the fear centers of the brain simply shut down as they recalled the event.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
-
Our increasing use of drugs to treat these conditions doesn’t address the real issues: What are these patients trying to cope with? What are their internal or external resources? How do they calm themselves down? Do they have caring relationships with their bodies, and what do they do to cultivate a physical sense of power, vitality, and relaxation? Do they have dynamic interactions with other people? Who really knows them, loves them, and cares about them? Whom can they count on when they’re scared, when their babies are ill, or when they are sick themselves? Are they members of a community, and do they play vital roles in the lives of the people around them? What specific skills do they need to focus, pay attention, and make choices? Do they have a sense of purpose? What are they good at? How can we help them feel in charge of their lives?
Bessel van der Kolk
-
Stabilize and calm patients down, help to lay traumatic memories and reenactments to rest, and reconnect patients with their fellow men and women.
Bessel van der Kolk
-
But most of our patients were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago.
Bessel van der Kolk
