Word: threats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fans. Gavin de Becker, who operates a 100-client security service in Los Angeles, charges those who request full-time protection an average of $225,000 a year. De Becker provides the staffs and publicists of celebrities with 20 pointers to help them screen letters or calls. A direct threat is not necessarily a good indicator of true danger, he says. " 'I'm going to kill you' is as common as a fan letter to many of these people." But, he adds, "it becomes different if someone says, 'I've sold my house, and I'm coming...
...Once most people treated me as a friend and a confidant," recalls Boyd McCracken Sr., 65, a family practitioner from Greenville, Ill. (pop. 5,000), who remembers making late-night house calls. "These days the malpractice threat has created a definite wedge between a physician and some of his patients...
...days when their patients were more respectful and their diagnoses unchallenged. But the soreness may also reflect the stresses and strains of a profession in transition. Nothing in medicine is stationary: the blinding speed of technological advances, the splintering effects of specialization, the onset of medical consumerism, the threat of malpractice suits have all bruised the doctor-patient relationship in recent years...
...costs of practice have driven out hordes of doctors altogether. According to a 1987 survey by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1 out of 8 U.S. obstetricians has left the field because of the malpractice threat. Those who manage to stay in business may feel forced to practice a kind of medicine that assumes every patient is a prospective litigant. Such defensive tactics are antithetical to compassionate care: the doctor ends up being afraid of someone he or she wants to help, cautious about trying attractive new treatments and emotionally aloof from someone in need of emotional support...
GREAT BALLS OF FIRE. This biopic stamps demon rocker Jerry Lee Lewis as a feral innocent in a time warp, instead of a sexual threat for Middle America. Dennis Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee with a nicely calculating recklessness, and Winona Ryder is hypnotically enigmatic as the singer's nymphet bride...