Word: doctorings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...doctor's words may speak louder than actions, but every patient hears them differently, and doctors end up feeling they cannot win. When Cincinnati receptionist Doris Roetting had a mastectomy in the fall of 1987, her surgeon assured her that she was recuperating nicely. Her oncologist, however, was a bit more explicit, to Roetting's dismay. He quietly explained that she had a 90% chance of being alive in five years and an 80% chance of surviving ten years. Some patients might have been grateful for such candor; Roetting went home in tears. "I think everybody who has cancer knows...
Those who, like Ponce, lament the anonymous quality of their treatment reflect a second revolution in patient care: the rise of the medical- industrial complex. Every bit as important as the advances in technology are the means of delivering them and deciding who should pay. Instead of an individual doctor seeing his regular patients in the privacy of his office, the typical encounter now occurs in the thick of a vast corporate hierarchy that monitors every decision and may weigh in against it. Marketing medicine has become very big business...
...effort to be educated consumers, today's patients read books with titles like What Your Doctor Didn't Learn in Medical School and Take This Book to the Hospital with You. The message is that a smart patient is an informed patient, who challenges a doctor's authority rather than submits uncritically to the physician's will and whims. Yet that approach rubs raw against a basic instinct. Patients want to trust their doctors, to view them as benign and authoritative. Even those who privately question a doctor's decisions may be loath to express dissent. Doctors admit that...
...ultimate price of inflated expectations and consumerist attitudes is the treacherous legal reality that confronts doctors today. Anything short of perfection becomes grounds for penalty. And once again, while it is the doctor who must pay the high insurance premiums and fend off the suits in court, the patient eventually pays a price. The annual number of malpractice suits filed has doubled in the past decade and ushered in the era of defensive medicine and risk managers. No single factor has done more to distance physicians from | patients than the possibility that a patient may one day put a doctor...
...impact of possible litigation is felt long before a patient sets foot in the doctor's office. Some physicians, like Linda Bolton, a pediatrician in Birmingham, Mich., try to screen out potential problems. "It really dictates what happens at the office. If I feel I have people who are litigious, I prefer not to take them as patients." In the past, she has fixed her rates only after she has been notified how much she will have to pay for malpractice insurance...