Patients Quotes
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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
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In patients with histories of incest, the proportion of RA cells that are ready to pounce is larger than normal. This makes the immune system oversensitive to threat, so that it is prone to mount a defense when none is needed, even when this means attacking the body’s own cells. Our study showed that, on a deep level, the bodies of incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety. This means that the imprint of past trauma does not consist only of distorted perceptions of information coming from the outside; the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe.
Bessel van der Kolk
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Doctor's Motto: Have patients.
Ethel Watts Mumford
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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
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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
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It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.
Bill Gates
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Patients deserve increased price transparency and affordable care, particularly as the system shifts significant costs to them.
Heather Bresch
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I trust I may be enabled in the treatment of patients always to act with a single eye to their good.
Joseph Lister
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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
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But most of our patients were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago.
Bessel van der Kolk
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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
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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
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Taub Therapy gives patients hope that they can recapture the life they had before suffering a stroke or TBI.
Edward Taub
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Diagnostic reliability isn’t an abstract issue: If doctors can’t agree on what ails their patients, there is no way they can provide proper treatment. When there’s no relationship between diagnosis and cure, a mislabeled patient is bound to be a mistreated patient. You would not want to have your appendix removed when you are suffering from a kidney stone, and you would not want have somebody labeled as “oppositional” when, in fact, his behavior is rooted in an attempt to protect himself against real danger.
Bessel van der Kolk
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What differentiated our patients was the abuse they had suffered within their families. They included a boy who was severely bruised from repeated beatings by his mother; a girl whose father had molested her at the age of four; two boys who had been repeatedly tied to a chair and whipped; and a girl who, at the age of five, had seen her mother (a prostitute) raped, dismembered, burned, and put into the trunk of a car. The mother’s pimp was suspected of sexually abusing the girl.
Bessel van der Kolk
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I grew up in the inner city and have spent a lot of time there and have dealt with a lot of patients from that area and recognize that we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities.
Benjamin Carson