Word: patients
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since acquired immunodeficiency syndrome was first recognized in 1981, it has struck 17,000 Americans, killing nearly half of them. But even more rampant than the deadly disease itself is a secondary epidemic: fear. AIDS patients around the country have become society's new untouchables. Workers have been fired; babies abandoned; children, like Ryan White of Kokomo, Ind., banned from school. The fears have persisted despite assurances from doctors that AIDS has been known to spread almost exclusively through sexual contact and exposure to infected blood. A poll taken last summer showed that nearly half of Americans thought they could...
Those studied included children, parents, siblings and other family members who had lived with an AIDS victim for an average of nearly two years. Even more significant, all had spent at least three months with the patient during an 18-month period before AIDS symptoms actually appeared, when the disease is believed to be most contagious. Some of the family members had shared toothbrushes, razors and clothing with the patient; half shared combs and drinking glasses; 37% slept in the same bed as a patient, and nearly all had exchanged hugs and kisses. Says Dr. Gerald Friedland...
...difficulties of managing the malpractice insurance increases are compounded by a state law that requires physicians to charge only what the patients' medical insurance will allow. This means that regardless of actual costs, the maximum fee a doctor can charge is determined by the patient's insurance rates...
Woodward said that possible solutions would involve some kind of short-term remedy for the large insurance rate increases and possibly a ceiling on the amount of money a patient can sue for in a malpractice case...
...Weintraub already considers his video camera, electronic tablet and IBM PC AT to be tools of his trade, enabling him to "talk to his patients through a picture." The technology, he says, stems from "the thought that you can capture a human image and develop the software to manipulate its parts." Weintraub captures the image of a new patient with his camera, stores a digitized record of it in his computer and then uses his stylus to smooth over wrinkles and remove unsightly bumps. Invoking a software program developed with the help of Artist Nancy Burson for electronically "aging" photographs...