Patient

For the adjective “patient”, see Patience.

A patient is a recipient of health care service from a physician, nurse, dentist, optometrist, veterinarian, or other health care provider. Veterinarians generally call the animals they treat "patients" and the animals' owners either "owners" or "clients".

Quotes

Patient empowerment is defined as helping people to discover and use their own innate ability to gain mastery over their diabetes (Funnell MM, Anderson RM. Diabetes Educ. 1991;17:37–41). While you cannot empower a patient, nurses can use strategies that will assist patients in this process. These include providing education for informed decision-making, assisting patients to weigh costs and benefits of various treatment options, setting self-selected behavioral goals, and providing information about the importance of their role in self-management (Funnell et al. Diabetes Educ. 2003;29:454–464). The skills needed by nurses include asking questions in order to understand the patients' fears, concerns, and priorities, listening to responses, and educating and supporting patients for on-going self-management
- Martha M. Funnell, (April 2004)"Patient empowerment". Critical Care Nursing Quarterly 27 (2): 201–204.

... In some cases there is a clear so-called patient zero to a fresh outbreak, perhaps the most well-known of whom is "Typhoid Mary" Mallon ...
But the truth is we don't know the majority of patient zeroes for a given disease, because the disease has been with us since time immemorial, or it erupted and spread too fast for us to pin down its origins, or other factors like politics or wars got in the way.
- Lydia Kang, M.D., and Nate Pedersen, "Introduction". Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases. Workman Publishing. 2021. p. xiii. ISBN 1523513292.

Patient expectations have changed. Many patients are active consumers of health care, comparing quality, service, and cost. They expect the highest technical quality of care, excellent customer service, and good value for the money they pay. They are interested in alternative treatments, and they ask more questions. They spend hours researching on the Internet. They do this for themselves, for their children, and for their aging parents. They judge the quality of the care and service they receive from their perspective.
- Liz Osborne, Resolving patient complaints: a step-by-step guide to effective service recovery. Jones & Bartlett Learning. 2004. p. 1.

L'art de la médecine consiste à distraire le malade pendant que la nature guérit la maladie.
translation: The art of medicine consists of distracting the patient while nature cures the disease.
- Voltaire, citations de Voltaire. Le Figaro.