Word: brazil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is an expression in Brazil--dar um jeito--that, loosely translated, means no problem is unsolvable and no barrier too great to cross. Dr. Randas Jose Vilela Batista adopted this attitude in dealing with the patients in his tiny rural hospital outside Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. Many of them were dying of congestive heart failure, which caused their hearts to weaken and enlarge. Because he lacked the resources necessary for the standard American treatments for the disease--drug therapy and heart transplant--Batista needed to come up with a different solution. The one he finally adopted appears...
...conditions under which Batista, 50, operates when he is in Brazil are spartan at best. There is little modern monitoring equipment at his Curitiba hospital. Instead, his technicians are instructed to look for three things: the patient's feet should be pink, to demonstrate adequate blood pressure; there should be urine output, to indicate that the patient has not lost kidney function; and the surgical drain should be clear, to show no internal bleeding. Surgeons depend on large windows in the operating room to provide adequate light for operations...
What keeps Batista going is not fancy equipment but his insatiable desire to find a better way of doing things. He trained in the U.S. and Canada for 12 years, but he discovered on his return to Brazil that he could not count on the state-of-the-art technology he had grown used to. So he had to make do with the available resources. "Established systems don't allow for any creativity," he says. "Here I can ask questions and find new answers. I love challenges." He fills his office walls with inspirational sayings like "He who tries...
...says Dr. Lawrence Kohn, a cardiac surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, "but we're waiting to see the scientific proof." And lack of proof has certainly been a problem. Because many of Batista's patients do not have phones and come from all areas of Brazil, he has done little to track the long-term effects of his procedure. Surgeons in Brazil were no more eager than most American doctors to accept Batista's claims. "When I first heard of this procedure, I thought he was a crank, one of those mystic doctors who periodically appear...
...Lexington, Mass. In Mexico, between April and June, the economy surged 8.8% over the same period a year earlier. Growth is expected to hit 6% in 1997 and 4.8% in 1998. Inflation, which reached 34.4% in 1996, will be sliced in half by the end of next year. Brazil's economy will expand 4% this year and 4.4% in 1998, according to Behravesh. Argentina, which was wallowing in recession in 1995, has rebounded sharply and will grow 6.5% this year and 5.5% in 1998, he predicts. Inflation will be zero this year and below 4% next year...