Word: sicklied
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Outside the office, Sawyer is praised as unfailingly gracious and generous. When relatives of co-workers are sick, she sends cards and fruit baskets; her thank-you notes are known for their eloquence. Her own life-style, meanwhile, is far from extravagant. In the New York City apartment she occupied while single, "she preferred no decor," says a close friend. "Basically, what she had was an awful little table in the living room with a couple of small couches and some dying plants." Admits Sawyer: "I'm hopeless. I'd just as soon send out for pizza...
Lodge takes care to keep these two evenly matched, each as disconcertingly perceptive and sweetly ridiculous as the other. Sexually, it is Robyn who is the lighthearted aggressor and Vic who, after spending a single night with her, turns into a love-sick calf and begins making alarming declarations about leaving his "podge" of a wife. Robyn, ever the teacher, expounds poststructuralist literary theory to him in bed, explaining that what he mistakes for love is merely a rhetorical device, a bourgeois fallacy. "Haven't you ever been in love, then?" he asks. "When I was younger," she replies...
There are rich ironies here. Never have doctors been able to do so much for their patients, and rarely have patients seemed so ungrateful. Eighty years ago, a sick man who consulted his physician had roughly a fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from the encounter. The doctor's cheery manner and solicitous style were compensation for the uncertainty of a cure. "Medicine originally was mainly talk," says Sidney Wolfe, a physician who directs the Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, "and very little effective diagnosis and treatment...
...physicians work in some kind of group practice, most commonly a health-maintenance organization. Patients pay a flat annual fee in exchange for care that is provided by HMO member doctors. As private corporations, many HMOs can be quite profitable -- so long as their patients do not get too sick. The number of patients enrolled in HMOs has doubled in the past five years, to 32 million, often at the urging of cost- conscious employers. The goals: efficiency through greater competition, lower costs, accountability and better preventive care...
...lofty pedestals. Never have doctors been able to do so much for their patients, and rarely have patients seemed so ungrateful. Today's doctors must contend with ever changing technology, ever threatening lawsuits and a medical-industrial complex second-guessing their every decision. No wonder they often feel as sick as their patients. See LIVING...