Word: transplanting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...think this system is robbing physicians of their essential goodness," says Dr. Roy B. Jones, a University of Colorado bone-marrow-transplant specialist who saw Christy deMeurers during her journey. "I think physicians are slanting the opinions they give based upon monetary considerations that in many cases they wouldn't have allowed to influence them before." Vincent Riccardi, a neurologist and expert on "Elephant Man" disease, says the issue of trust in California is already moot. He has gone so far as to establish a company, American Medical Consumers, that plans one day to dispatch "personal medical advocates" to negotiate...
...than most of the other plans surveyed and more on marketing, salaries and other administrative expenses. The company is known among California doctors as one of the most aggressively cost conscious in the state, a reputation that stems in part from an earlier attempt to deny a bone-marrow transplant to a subscriber named Nelene Fox, who by coincidence lived just minutes from the deMeurerses. The jury in that case awarded the Fox family $89.1 million, later negotiated down to an undisclosed...
...bone scan, which showed her cancer had spread; her disease was now classified as Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Given the standard therapies available, it was a death sentence, but her oncologist, Dr. Mahesh Gupta, warmly assured her there was hope. He recommended she consider a bone-marrow transplant and, in a breach of Health Net procedure, skipped the usual channels for making referrals and arranged a consultation with a physician he knew, Dr. Robert McMillan, an oncologist at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. Christy's sister, living in Colorado, had urged her to see a leading bone-marrow...
...Gupta, reviewing his notes on the case, says Dr. McMillan agreed Christy was a candidate for a transplant but said she would first have to undergo several cycles of chemotherapy to demonstrate that her tumor would respond to the potent drugs used in bone-marrow therapy. In the deMeurerses' eyes, however, it was a deeply troubling encounter. Dr. McMillan declined even to describe what was involved in a bone-marrow transplant or give the family a tour of the Scripps facilities, according to Alan deMeurers and Christy's mother, Joyce Nesmith. "I believe he was told to send us away...
...double bind. "Is it reasonable," he asks, "for an insurer to demand the gold standard of proof and simultaneously refuse to pay for patients to enter a trial to get that level of proof?" Dr. Jones is convinced that women who once would have come to him for a transplant aren't coming because their doctors, operating under tight managed-care cost guidelines, aren't telling them that transplants are a medical option. "You put yourself in a position where you don't discuss it, or else discuss it and, worse yet, indicate that all the data is negative...