Word: debakey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there are simply not enough donor hearts around for the up to 75,000 U.S. patients who need them each year. For this reason, Barnard's fellow pioneers, Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, say the Utah heart is an important breakthrough. Both believe, however, that it should be used only temporarily to sustain patients until donors can be found. Cooley has in fact twice used a more primitive apparatus than Jarvik's for this purpose. Says Cooley: "I've never thought of the artificial heart and transplant as being competitive. They complement each other...
...suggested a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer; after heart surgery; in New Orleans. An outspoken critic of American health habits, he co-founded the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans in 1941 and served as its director of surgery for 24 years, training heart specialists like Michael DeBakey and attending such patients as Argentina's President Juan Peron, Golfer Ben Hogan and Actor Gary Cooper...
...many doctors, a headache is "cephalalgia." Itching is "pruritus." Swallowing is "deglutition." Professionals tend to view such words as tools of the trade and an aid to precise speech. But Lois DeBakey, a professor of scientific communication at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, thinks that technical jargon not only alienates patients but masks fuzzy thinking...
...seminars and with a traveling lecture entitled "Please, Doctor, Watch Your Language," DeBakey (sister of Heart Surgeon Michael DeBakey) campaigns against "medicant," her term for the linguistic disease that afflicts physicians. Lois and her sister Selma, who is also on the Baylor faculty, spoof the ways in which medicant fractures ordinary language by asking audiences to scan horrible examples from medical journals. A favorite: the article by a professional administrator that urged medical staffs to "take an aggressively penetrating approach to the communicative dimensions of the interfaces between institutions of medicine." Another example: "Birth weight and gestation were obtained...
...Says DeBakey: "Until society restores literacy to a position of esteem, there is no motivation for young people to learn to read and write." Aptly enough, she advises doctors to heed the words of Alexander Pope: "Words are like leaves; and where they most abound/ Much fruit of sense is rarely found...