Word: patiently
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Attorneys representing the hospital and the doctors involved in the case take yet another tack. The hospital's lawyer, Theodore Einhorn, urges the court to leave the patient to her doctors, who are best qualified to decide how to treat her. Ralph Porzio, counsel for Morse and Javed, agrees. If the court authorizes an action that may end Karen's life, he says, "hundreds of thousands of people who are confined to institutions for the chronically ill" will be affected. They "may be in a condition similar to Karen's and you can terminate their lives...
Outsiders who have followed the case are similarly divided. Doctors acknowledge that they occasionally practice "judicious neglect," deciding, for example, against reviving a terminal cancer patient who has just gone into cardiac arrest or performing corrective surgery on a hopelessly retarded infant with a serious heart condition as well. Indeed, many doctors admit that the withholding of extraordinary medical care is a not uncommon practice at both ends of the life spectrum. Dr. Raymond Duff, for instance, revealed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1974 that of 299 infants who died over a 2½-year period...
...eight lawyers in the case, two declare that the matter should not be argued in court at all. The hospital's attorney, Theodore Einhorn, says that the court ought to leave the patient to her doctors. So does Ralph Porzio, the lawyer for those doctors. "Miss Quinlan must be viewed as a patient undergoing treatment," says Porzio. Some outside doctors feel the same way. To allow the court to decide the Quinlan case, says Dr. David Posqanzer, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, "is taking the judgment of a doctor and putting it in the hands of those...
...impatient with what they see as the slow pace of reform in U.S. medicine, and increasingly militant about what they consider their own exploitation. They have also become extremely skeptical of organized medicine's promises, usually extracted under the threat of a strike or job action, to improve patient care or shorten the 100-hour weeks that house physicians sometimes work. "Goodwill arrangements and personal promises are swell," says P.N.H.A. Executive Director Steve Diamond, "but they have about the same value as a no-return beer bottle. Written contracts have proved to be the only way we can guarantee...
...National Labor Relations Act, thus giving them the right to form into bargaining units and seek representation by a labor union. The P.N.H.A. petition has the strong support of Senator Edward Kennedy, who agrees with the organization's criticism of American medicine and its announced intention of improving patient care. It is not expected to draw active opposition from the American Med ical Association, which disapproves of unionization but approved the New York strikers' demand for shorter shifts to improve patient care. The A.M.A., says a spokesman, "believes that physicians are better represented by a professional association with...