Clinic Quotations | Page 2

The 100 Top Hospital award winners continue to demonstrate significant distinctions in provision of value to their communities, as shown by objective differences in clinical outcomes, patient safety, efficient operations and financial stability. These top 100 hospitals react quicker to challenges than their peers, and they focus on all aspects of care, not just one.

This program is about giving people the tools that work. The Betty Ford Clinic doesn't work for methamphetamine. You can't do this in 30 days. You have to get somebody in, dry them out, teach them, and then when they get back into society, you have to have some type of safety net and support group for them.

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

Merck acted responsibly, from researching Vioxx prior to approval in studies with almost 10,000 patients, to monitoring the medicine while it was on the market, to voluntarily withdrawing the medicine when it did. We based our decisions on the data from well controlled clinical trials.

Who knows what the real situation is in cattle in the United States? And with people, we could be sitting on a time bomb, because the incubation period of this disease in humans can be up to 40 years. That's why a blood test is so important. We need to know the extent of the problem, we need to make sure that beef and the human blood supply are safe, and we need early diagnosis so that when scientists develop a therapy we can intervene before clinical symptoms appear--by then, it's too late.

If only positive results are published this can distort medical literature and leave doctors thinking a treatment is more effective than it actually is. This in turn can affect the validity and findings of subsequent reviews, treatment decisions and clinical practice guidelines.

I found myself at dusk in the bewitching Roman city of Jerash with H.M. Queen Rania of Jordan one year, and scrambling with hardened paparazzi to get an image of the Princess of Wales in a tiny Nepalese clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas another.

The problem wasn't with the city, the sport, my teammates or my coach, even though I blamed all of them at one time or another. The problem was with me. But I didn't realize it back then because I hadn't been told that there was a clinical reason -- social anxiety disorder -- for everything odd I was feeling, everything from the depression to the shyness. I didn't understand that some of the things that were holding me back were chemical.

The magic can happen in a studio. Special things can happen in a recording studio, even though it may seem like a clinical environment from the outside looking in.

My contention is that if we expand the patient-centered health care approach, we'll have less people that have to go the medical clinic that provides free service or go to the emergency room - they can have their own health care plan.