Word: detox
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Crank is too cheap, too available and too addictive, Sumner says. "Honestly, I don't know where it's going." The crankers who show up at the clinic require, on average, four weeks of detox, often with the use of antipsychotic drugs, before the counselors can even get through to them. On a wall in the Rimrock recreation room hangs a homemade poster showing a medevac helicopter like those that land at nearby St. Vincent Hospital. The poster is intended to reassure paranoid recovering crankers, but many are so unstrung that they fear the helicopter is after them...
Janet Cousrouf, Rimrock's director of nursing, says crank carries with it almost a two-week residue of paranoia. "Since the detox time is longer than most companies are willing to pay for, our biggest problem is insurance...
...these treatment boutiques and the businessmen who are promoting them that have given rapid detox a bad name, says Dr. Ron Wender, head of anesthesiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Wender's experience at the CITA center at Cedars-Sinai has convinced him that ultrarapid detox, properly performed and with appropriate follow-up, "should be welcomed with open arms...
What prompted E.R.'s producers to air the ultrarapid detox drama? Critics point to an April article in the Wall Street Journal that detailed instances of TV shows being successfully lobbied by medical foundations and others to include dramatizations of specific diseases. In one example the Journal described how the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation wooed Dr. Neal Baer, an E.R. writer and producer, besieging him with studies on the increased risk of contracting AIDS for those with chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease--a risk that was then mentioned...
Baer denies that he was lobbied to put either chlamydia or rapid-detox on E.R. Chlamydia is a common problem and so, in Hollywood, is heroin addiction; one marquee actor is reported to have gone through ultrarapid detox just in time for this year's Academy Awards. In fact, says Baer, the idea for the detox episode came from a pediatric anesthesiologist invited by E.R. to help generate story lines...