Word: sickness
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...something is clearly wrong with the system as it now operates. Over the past three years, more than 60 institutions, including several of the world's most prestigious research centers, have been criticized by the U.S. government for failing to protect human subjects adequately. McGee's patients were very sick, so in a sense they couldn't be made much worse by his treatments. But federal records show that since 1999 at least four people who entered clinical trials in reasonably good health wound up dead--including two infamous cases, at Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the University of Pennsylvania...
...paying healthy volunteers $1,000 to complete a six-month regimen of perchlorate, a rocket-fuel component that disrupts thyroid function and may cause retardation in babies. Lockheed Martin funded the study after some 800 lawsuits charged that the company leaked perchlorate into the water supply and made people sick...
Twenty trend-crazy, “love sick maidens” pine after the poet Bunthorne, who puts on artsy airs to seduce them. The local Dragoon Guards, a crew of macho men who were once fancied by these women—but now discarded with the changing fashion—look on disapprovingly...
Take asbestos litigation, currently the hottest field for zealous lawyers. Though asbestos products have been removed from circulation for decades, and notwithstanding the fact that most sick patients filed lawsuits against corporations decades ago, there are currently more than 200,000 asbestos cases awaiting trial nationwide. Fortune magazine estimates that total damages could eventually top $200 billion. To put that in context, last year total corporate profits were only $767 billion, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. That means that one type of lawsuit, filed against a small minority of firms, could wipe out more than 25 percent...
Worse yet, most plaintiffs in these cases are not sick—they exhibit some lung damage that comes with age or smoking, but is difficult to separate from harmful asbestos exposure. Claimants like these, unlike the truly sick who most often seek out their lawsuits, are rounded up in mass screenings by lawyers looking to add to the roles of plaintiffs; after all, such lawyers take 25 to 40 percent of the damages. In a sadistic twist, these kind of lawsuits prevent the truly sick from being compensated and having their care paid for, because the corporations that made...