Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With the Government and private insurers picking up the check, hospitals have speedily expanded, adding beds that are not needed and competing vigorously for patients by buying such expensive equipment as CAT scanners, sophisticated diagnostic computer devices that cost as much as $700,000. Califano estimates that there are enough CATS in Southern California to serve the entire western U.S. Having made such heavy investments, hospitals feel compelled to use the equipment even though it may not be necessary, thus driving medical costs up further. The doctor too is encouraged to provide services that are not strictly needed. Faced with...
...many months, the 35-year-old man has been receiving chemicals to halt his cancer. But now, emaciated and racked with pain, he can no longer tolerate the powerful drugs. Everyone, including the patient, realizes that the chemotherapy is not working. The cancer has spread, and treatment is being stopped. Even before the notion of death can be fully accepted by the man or by his family, a hospital official calls aside the patient's wife. He tells her that since the hospital can do nothing more for her husband, he must be discharged and she must find another...
Other hospices, like the one at Manhattan's St. Luke's Hospital Center, now flourish within existing medical institutions. In fact, at St. Luke's, the hospice patients are not kept in a "death ward," but are scattered throughout the hospital, where they are regularly visited by special doctors, nurses and counselors attached to the hospice program. Members of the regular hospital staff report that watching the way hospice people treat the terminally ill has helped them modify their own behavior. "When a patient knows he's dying," one doctor notes, "you can't just...
Whatever the setting, an immediate priority of hospices is the relief of chronic pain and fear, which can be particularly severe when patients are dying of cancer. Unlike traditional hospitals, where terminal patients are often so heavily doped that they are virtually in a stupor, hospices usually administer methadone or a special mixture that may include morphine, cocaine, alcohol and syrup. Even before the pain begins to be extreme, the mix is given in relatively small quantities at various intervals around the clock. This helps allay the fear of pain and reduces the amount of drugging necessary to control...
...October 1973, Dr. Kenneth Edelin, then 35 and chief resident in the overworked, understaffed obstetrics service at Boston City Hospital, performed an abortion on a 17-year-old. The operation terminated the patient's pregnancy and, for the time being, her problems. Edelin's woes were just beginning. By spring of the following year, the doctor found himself under indictment, and in January 1975, he went on trial for manslaughter...