Word: couchful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Boston University Medical Center, 290 suffered almost 500 medical mishaps. More than 200 of these complications were due to drugs. An additional 175 resulted from other treatments or diagnostic tests. These mishaps contributed to the death of 15 patients. At the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Surgeon Nathan Couch and colleagues reviewed the cases of 5,612 patients admitted for surgery in 1978 and 1979. According to Couch, medical mishaps (costing at least $1.3 million in extra care) occurred in 36 patients, leading to serious physical impairment in five people and the death of eleven. Says Couch: "Obviously...
...Couch attributes surgery-related mishaps to clearly avoidable errors by doctors who were too quick to operate, too confident of their skills and techniques, and too concerned with doing currently fashionable procedures. By contrast, Steel feels it is often impossible to assign blame for complications that occur among general medical patients, and that this is even more true for the many elderly patients with multiple ailments in the study. The complex of diagnostic tests and drugs used makes it difficult to isolate any one cause of trouble. Says Steel: "I don't really know for certain...
Though increasing fear of malpractice suits and touchy medical egos make candor difficult, both Steel and Couch urge more open, self-critical discussions of medical mishaps by physicians and hospital staffs. Says Couch: "If you hear about some mistake, you certainly are less apt to repeat it. It's a cheap way to gain experience." The teams also recommend that doctors keep patients and families fully informed throughout the hospital stay. "Doctors often underestimate a patient's intelligence," notes Couch, "as well as the family's willingness to be cooperative...
...mean, jazz--I don't know how to play jazz! But there I was. And I loved the control I had over the party. You can make people dance if you want to, or if you change the music you can get people to make out on the couch. It was really...
Reagan settles on the couch, and reality hits like a sledgehammer. There is "Dutch" Reagan, the Saturday voice out of the cornfields, bringing the Big Ten football games. There is Drake McHugh of Kings Row, right off the screen of the Grand Theater, and Lieut. George Custer from Santa Fe Trail and the Gipper from Knute Rockne, All American and a hundred other boyhood flashbacks. There too is the President of the U.S., still the most powerful single authority in the world...