Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Specialists disagree about the causes of agoraphobia. A few doctors think it may stem from hormonal imbalances or overuse of stimulants, even coffee, but most experts are sure the affliction is a psychic one. Freudians consider it a neurotic symptom. Many psychologists see it simply as learned behavior: a patient has an initial breakdown so traumatic that it leaves him in a constant state of anxiety over a possible recurrence, thus producing the phobia...
Therapists also differ widely about how the condition should be treated. The most common technique is behavior modification; its use is based on the assumption that agoraphobia is a habit to be broken. Treatment consists of gradually exposing the phobic patient to feared sit uations, first by having him imagine them, then by forcing him, for instance, to take longer and longer solo walks until the stress disappears. A more drastic technique, similar to throwing a baby into a pool to teach it how to swim, is known as "implosion"?a patient might be driven to a large empty...
...patient searchers discern more and more about early man and his predecessors, they also may gain an ever-widening insight about modern man, his nature, his failings and his future. Most major anthropologists reject the notion popularized by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and others that man is inherently aggressive and that his murderous instincts derive from his apelike origins. Indeed, they have found no evidence in their digs that man was anything but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It was farming, they believe, that created settlers with property to protect...
...prototype pneumonia vaccine. All had sickle-cell anemia, a genetic disorder largely confined to blacks that, besides inflicting other damage, impairs the spleen's ability to filter dangerous bacteria out of the blood. Even after two years, Dr. Arthur J. Ammann and his colleagues said, not a single patient had developed a pneumococcus infection; the only reaction from the shots in the arm was a little swelling and a short-lived fever...
Kurland's experiences, as well as Diamond's, underscore what seems increasingly clear to many investigators: there is a strong psychological component to both headaches and their treatment, and the patient's confidence in the doctor may play a crucial role. Says Elkind: "The better the relationship is, the more successful the results are likely...