Word: patients
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...where anybody can start over at any time and work his way to the top, and every baseball team can show up on opening day with an undefeated record. It's not a mental problem; it's a national tradition. Compared with other nations, America itself is an amnesia patient, a country with only a fairly recent history to speak of, fabricated out of whole cloth a mere 200 years and change ago by a bunch of people who figured they'd start afresh on a brand-new, spotless continent. Maybe that's why we think we can go overseas...
...pick up an infection while they are there. Sometimes the culprit is a germ that they've brought with them to the hospital--typically some bacteria on the skin that follow the path of a needle or catheter into the body. But most hospital infections are transmitted from one patient to another by doctors, nurses and other health-care workers. No, doctors and nurses aren't carrying around vials of disease-causing bugs and cracking them open at bedside. Often the germs are hitching a ride on the hands of hospital workers...
Many states require that newly built hospitals have at least two sinks per room--one for the patient, another for the medical staff (who might otherwise feel they were intruding by using the patient's sink to wash their hands). In January researchers at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., recommended that health-care workers carry alcohol hand rubs in their pockets to make disinfecting easier. Lately some hygiene experts have suggested that patients ask doctors and nurses whether they've washed their hands before an examination begins...
...Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never given its full blessing to any of them. That may soon change. A panel of experts last week recommended that the FDA approve the CardioWest Total Artificial Heart for use as a temporary, fully implantable replacement heart that can keep a patient alive until a transplant can be found. That's lifesaving news for the 3,500 Americans waiting for a heart donor. But it's also a sobering reminder that only 2,000 human hearts become available through donation each year...
This is why, Lipsitt said, it is important for physicians and family members, as the first step towards treatment, to acknowledge that “the patient is not willfully creating their symptoms” but rather suffering from a sickness that is “very real...