Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Mark Molliver. Eventually some of the cells regenerate, but they are often malformed. Moreover, the overdose doesn't have to be huge. All Molliver had to do was double the dosage required for weight loss. In humans, such an overdose could presumably happen if a patient simply took two pills by accident instead...
...severe burn patients, the first priority of treatment is to restore the damaged skin that is the body's first line of defense against microbes. To lessen the need for taking extensive skin grafts from other areas of a burn patient's already weakened body, several biotechnology companies have developed grafts made from collagen, a fibrous protein that is a natural component of skin and other tissues. The laboratory-grown collagen serves as a permanent scaffolding, above, in areas in which both the upper epidermis and deeper dermal layers of skin have been burned. Once grafted, new skin cells...
...outright--and it continues to do so. Insurance companies, health-maintenance organizations, private-practice physicians, hospitals, drug companies and a host of other vested interests are all fighting furiously to determine which of these interests comes out on top. When all is said and done, I am afraid, the patient may end up on the bottom...
...rapidly proliferating HMOs--most of them investor owned and for profit--seem to be interested firstly in managing costs and only secondarily in maintaining health. When profit, not health, is the objective, it poses a real threat--to the doctor-patient relationship, to academic medical centers, to medical research and to those who are unable to obtain health insurance. Whatever its flaws, traditional fee-for-service medicine always allowed physicians to act as advocates for their patients. HMOs cannot assure us that physicians will, in every instance, put their patients' interests first...
...flaws of a business-first and patient-care-second system are not confined to managed care. Insurance-covered fee-for-service medicine creates similar problems: insurance companies are accumulating enormous power and wealth by taking over the ownership or management of entire health-care delivery systems--and even of some medical schools--rather than merely collecting premiums from subscribers and processing claims to providers as they traditionally did. All across America we see an accelerating trend of taking medical decisions away from doctors and patients and allowing them to be made by businessmen and -women...