Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...regard to the Quinlan case [Nov. 3]: if the courts were to find in favor of the parents, a Pandora's box would be opened. If the courts were to judge that an act of omission by a physician in not prolonging life is homicide, then every patient who dies could become the basis of legal action against the physician. Such a decision would virtually paralyze the practice of medicine...
According to the psychiatrist, Dr. Ronald Liebman, Chief of Psychiatry at Philadelphia's Children's Hospital, that shift in the discussion helped bring the asthma under control. "The patient's overprotective parents," he says, "were focusing so much concern on her that she was responding with ever more severe symptoms." The girl understood that her parents' concern was no longer focused on her alone but on two family problems. After two months of complicated family therapy, the girl's asthma symptoms subsided. The trips to hospital emergency rooms ended, and she missed no more school...
...case is a classic one in family therapy, the medical movement that arose some 15 years ago from a common clinical observation: many psychiatric patients seem unable to get better because of the pressures their families put on them. Family therapists began by abandoning the one-on-one, isolated relationship of traditional psychiatry to take on a patient's whole family. Their aim: to expose and break family patterns that create individual emotional disorders. Now family therapists are increasingly finding that those patterns also help produce physical ailments, from asthma to heart attacks and-some are convinced-even cancer...
...shortly after a grown son or daughter leaves home. His hypothesis: the child may have functioned as a buffer for parental conflict. Psychologist Dina Fleischer of Richmond's Medical College of Virginia reports on the family of a man who had a heart transplant in 1968: when the patient was near death, the family functioned well; when he recovered, the family unraveled; whenever he relapsed, the family functioned well again...
...more subtle and established practice of passive euthanasia, for which the Mass General committee did not set guidelines, is the labeling of certain patients "Do Not Resuscitate," or DNR. The designation applies to dying patients who are apt to suffer cardiac or respiratory failure. Doctors justify the practice because resuscitation only prolongs a patient painfully and at great expense. Cardiac arrest, they say, is only the last organ failure in a dying patient and to resuscitate him is not to allow nature to take its course...