Word: patiently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...desperation, such patients are turning increasingly to the growing number of pain clinics across the country. Because of the psychological component of pain, these centers include psychiatrists, counselors and social workers in multidisciplinary medical teams. Back pain can account for half or more of their patient loads. Their principal strategy is, as Dr. Steven Brena of Emory University's Pain Control Center in Atlanta puts it, to convince patients that pain is "a perception, not a sensation." Translation: they train patients to deal with their pain, if it cannot be eliminated, and live around...
...Neurosurgeon Yoshio Ho-sobuchi of the University of California in San Francisco. He implants one to three hair-thin electrodes in the brain or spine; these wires lead to a small radio-activated electrical source placed just under the skin of the chest. To get relief from pain, the patient presses a small radio transmitter against the chest. The transmitter's signal activates the little power plant, which promptly shoots a tiny electrical current into the brain or spine and thus fires critical nerve cells. The object: to release a flow of beta-endorphin, a morphine-like substance produced...
...some cases, when nothing seems to help the pain, the patient is malingering. He uses an injury, often minor, to press lawsuits, collect workmen's compensation and Social Security, and pick up insurance disability payments. The problem is not confined to the U.S. In Sweden 25% of workers who retire early do so because of back troubles-in many cases on the basis of obviously phony claims. Keim says facetiously that such people are suffering from "green poultice syndrome": "These patients often respond miraculously to the application of $100 bills. When the pile of bills reaches the proper thickness...
...Canfield Co. has a new client for its bottled Natural Seltzer Water. Reads the back of the label: "An excellent water for all house-plants." In a chorus of ads on Midwestern television and radio stations, Canfield proclaims the wonders of Natural Seltzer when administered to a patient like that limping rubber tree in the corner. Rhapsodizes Vice President Alan Canfield Jr.: "When you water plants with our product, you're giving them food and you're giving their soil a new lease on life...
...personally sacred realm used to enclose a great deal that went on at home and at large; there were reasons for confidentiality between doctor and patient. But the variety of intimate matters now bandied about is without apparent limits. On talk shows like Phil Donahue's, ordinary people regularly recount stories of emotional disturbance, marital discord, incest. Men chat about their vasectomies, women about their hysterectomies. The spectacle of Lyndon B. Johnson flashing his surgical scar to the world, so vulgar at the time, seems comparatively genteel in retrospect...