Word: inert
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Adding insult to injury, many "survivors," as they call themselves, report that doctors and other medical personnel routinely leer at or ridicule the inert bodies before them. Jeanette Tracy, a television producer from Dallas, suffered this when she was anesthetized for a hernia operation in 1991. Enduring pain she describes as "a blow torch in my stomach...every tissue tearing like a piece of paper," she heard the anesthesiologist say she had "the right size breasts" and was in "great shape" for a mother of two. "You can't cover yourself," she says furiously. "You're screaming as loud...
After learning that placebos can range from inert pills to actual doctors, after discovering the distinctions between "disease" and "illness," "healing" and "curing," one can venture into the last half of the collection, where a veritable alphabet soup of terms lurk and psychosomatic explorations abound. Abandon all hope, ye who wrestled with the QRR and plan to enter here: inverse relations and normalized sets of data concerning placebo efficacy literally pepper the pages. Authors Donald D. Price and Howard L. Fields even include an exponential function describing the placebo effect (Feeling intensity = Desire x Expectation...
...example--and then touches electrodes to exposed brain areas. It is like an electrician testing a circuit: wherever he picks up current, he knows he has a live connection, indicating that the tumor is entwined with eloquent brain and cannot just be cut out. Otherwise, he is touching inert tumor tissue. Conversely, with direct stimulation, Black applies the current to the tumor and sees if the body twitches in response...
...telomeres weren't completely inert. One thing they almost always appeared to do was grow shorter. Each time a cell divided, the daughter cells it produced had a little less telomere to play with. Finally, when the cell reached its Hayflick limit of 100 or so replications, the telomere was reduced to a mere nub. At that point, the cell quit replicating. Once it did, researchers theorized, the genes previously covered by the telomere became exposed and active, producing proteins that triggered the tissue deterioration associated with aging...
...skillful way Chris' accident, therapy and campaign for spinal-cord research were interwoven with the personal aspects of his life and thoughts. You captured the paradox in his driving perfectionism and his unsure self-criticism. The opening paragraph was especially masterly in its description of Chris in his chair, inert and immobile but all forward motion in his eyes and his thinking. Similarly, the last image of him, on the tilt table, standing tall, was so apt and telling of his strong desire to walk again. BARBARA L. JOHNSON Princeton, New Jersey...