Word: patient
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only the naive believe that patients in a state mental hospital get much personal attention from psychiatrists. There are too few psychiatrists and too many patients; the ratio is about 1 to 100. Many of the doctors are administrators who never see patients, and most of them have at least some administrative duties. And after the doctor takes out time for staff meetings and professional conferences, the patient is lucky if he gets 15 minutes of a psychiatrist's time a week...
...helps the patient? Kansas' Topeka State Hospital declares in an official pamphlet: "Patients are directly dependent on psychiatric aides, the only team members who are with them every hour of the day and night. The aides are likely to know the patient best. The aide's influence on patients and the quality of person needed in his job are often underestimated by the public. The quality of treatment in mental hospitals depends directly on them...
...1950s, the Menninger brothers wrought a transformation at the nearby state hospital. Thanks to their lobbying, the old snake pit was replaced by attractive modern buildings. Topeka State abandoned its bars, chains and straitjackets and began returning "incurable" mental patients from the shadows of its back wards. (One woman was released after 53 years in confinement.) Kansas led the states in the modernity and humanity of its approach to mental illness, and its budget of $8 a day for a patient's care was about the nation's highest. But that was a dozen years...
...Cripple. Far from making a "cardiac cripple" of their patient, as so many doctors were still doing, Ike's physicians advised him to get all the exercise he could. He did not overeat, and he cut down on hard fats and sweets. This regimen kept Eisenhower's arteries working well for eight full years. Then came his second and third heart attacks, in 1965. Again, Ike recovered astonishingly well for a man then 75 years old. But more episodes were predictable...
...Elmer A. Anderson finished first in a competition for the medical directorship of a Los Angeles County hospital, but then the County Human Relations Commission had to exert pressure to get him appointed. Anderson believes that staff discrimination hurts doctor and patient alike. "If a doctor has a patient who needs some special treatment that he cannot provide, he not only loses that patient to another doctor, but in many cases he loses contact with the whole family as well. Not getting on a staff hurts a man's ego and destroys the relationship between patient and doctor...