The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

I do not practice clinical medicine and hence do not treat individual patients. My career is in medical science.

Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude's are treated without regard for the family's ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital.

Many of us are alarmed at the skyrocketing cost of medical care, including patients, who are the consumers. However, medical malpractice is not the reason for these increasing costs.

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

I would like the Medical Society to be one of the resources for information about the influences that have an impact on our patients and our practices.

Researches tested a new form of medical marijuana that treats pain but doesn't get the user high, prompting patients who need medical marijuana to declare, 'Thank you?'

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.

As my mentor in Medical School, Dr William Strong taught me: Never wear a white coat; it separates you from a fellow human being. I never have from that day on. You are your patients guide, counselor, and defender, not their ruler and dictator.

Over the years, HIV/AIDS activists and their allies have been pioneers in creating new frontiers in the medical establishment. Through their efforts, the FDA drug approval procedures were reformed so promising new therapies could reach desperate patients quicker.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

I think my father gave me a great reverence for medical science. He was about as opposite to the personality of House as one could imagine. He was polite and easygoing, and would have gone to great lengths to make his patients feel attended to and heard and sympathized with.

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed.

I totally deplore the notion of an M.D. giving pills to patients - a medical doctor giving psychological or psychoactive change agents to another person.

Even top caliber hospitals cannot escape medical mistakes that sometimes result in irreparable damage to patients.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

My choice of learning pharmacy was driven by my interests, curiosity, and a desire to seek new medicines for patients.

We sometimes think that the best doctors are the ones who have the most specialized knowledge or the fanciest degrees, but in fact, study upon study, including one published in the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' show that the best doctors are the ones who also know how to connect with their patients.