Word: patients
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that the very word cancer engenders. As Curtis Bill Pepper points out, for early detection people must shed their fears sufficiently to go for routine cancer checkups. Once a diagnosis of malignancy has been made, the afflicted may have to take aggressive action. This could involve collisions between the patient and his family doctor and a tough-minded struggle for an appointment with an appropriate oncologist at one of the "comprehensive cancer centers" such as New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston...
...patient may be obliged to assume this responsibility, says Pepper, because "there is no other area of medicine with so great a gap between daily practice and the theoretical possibility of available treatment." Many doctors who do not specialize in cancer fail to keep up with the latest treatment strategies and often lack the connections needed for speedy referral to a cancer center. Some subscribe to the principle "let them die in peace," thus discouraging patients from seeking care that may prolong their lives...
...attentive and compassionate listener, Pepper has constructed his book around interviews with former cancer patients at Memorial. These survivors offer considerable testimony of bad or even potentially fatal medical advice proffered by the physicians they saw first. Estelle Marsicano was scoffed at by her family doctor. "My liver is large too-want to feel it?" he asked. When John Alexion consulted a prominent urologist about his prostate cancer, the patient recalled, "the elderly doctor proceeded to lay a bomb on me. The only procedure he would consider was surgical castration and radical removal of the prostate. I thought, 'Jesus...
Over the years Christian Science periodicals have published 50,000 carefully verified testimonies of spiritual healing, including cases where medicine has proved ineffective. Intellectual integrity, not to mention scientific curiosity, demands that such results be taken seriously. An occasional failure no more discredits the method than a patient's death on the operating table discredits medicine...
...inflation that may hit 60% this year and a $2.5 billion foreign debt. Politicians on all sides felt that the measures placed an unfair burden on the lower classes, whose earning power has decreased by 50% in the past three months. The IMF medicine, they fear, will kill the patient...