Word: patients
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...health care and fear invasive medical intervention to the bitter end, or a lingering, undignified death while hooked up to life-prolonging technologies. A Gallup Poll conducted last April found that 75 percent of Americans believe that doctors should be allowed to end the lives of terminally ill patients by painless means if the patient requests it. Two appeals cases on this issue made it to the U.S. Supreme Court this summer; the Court ruled that there was not a constitutional right to receive physician aid-in-dying, thus effectively turning the issue over to state legislatures for further discussion...
...before this can be done, Salome explains, there is another crucial part of the cure. Holding a coconut-shell bowl containing ashes, she flicks them in the direction of Cox, who is playing the patient. When he soberly asks why the ashes are necessary, she replies that they enhance "spiritual transmission" between healer and patient. "We Westerners have to suspend judgment at these times," says Cox. "Look at our own belief in doctors wearing white coats. In Western culture that uniform is comparable to the 'spiritual transmission' she sees...
...showing promising results. Of the 63 participants who tested positive, only two have required psychiatric hospitalization, in both cases after the onset of symptoms. Still, not all the others who now show symptoms are having an easy time. A team social worker occasionally has had to bail a patient out of jail. "People make bad decisions," says Brandt, "especially in the early part of the disease...
Kala-azar itself was not the only problem. One day a patient who had gone mad threw a spear through another man's chest. Seaman operated and saved the man's life. Then she and De Wit operated on a man so riddled with tropical ulcers that his bones were exposed...
Once treated, a patient is likely to remain immune to the disease. But the price of stopping the epidemic, which amounted to more than $1 million a year poured in by MSF-Holland, has been high in human terms as well. Of 70 Nuer and Dinka nurses trained by Seaman and the other MSF doctors, more than 75% have come down with kala-azar themselves. Five lost children to the disease...