Word: treatment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nevertheless, a literature of migraines has formed over the centuries. The founding father of migraine theory is a Victorian physician named Edward Liveing, who called them "nerve-storms," but references to them can be pried out of Sumerian documents 5,000 years old. The history of their treatment is about as bizarre and useless a medical menagerie as you could wish for. (Two words: beaver testes.) It's only in the past 40 years that they've have become a serious topic for mainstream medicine...
Levy takes us through his own treatment and the wreckage his migraines create around them - the abandoned dinner parties, the bad parenting, the lousy job performance. He encourages us to generalize from his example to take in the true dimensions of what is still a largely silent epidemic: 1 in 10 Americans suffers from migraines, and only around half of them have received a diagnosis...
...medicine cabinet is familiar with the warnings against using nearly every kind of medication, including those sold over the counter, from the moment of conception onward. Yet each year in the U.S., some 500,000 pregnant women battle psychiatric illness, cancer, autoimmune disease, influenza and other conditions that require treatment. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether the benefits of certain drugs outweigh the risks to the baby, what is the appropriate dosage for a mom-to-be? Given the shifts in her metabolism, how much she should take is often anyone's guess...
...prosthesis are difficult, occasionally impossible, to deny to the folks who ask for them. In the American doctors' precarious medico-legal (and fiscal-social) position, career success is increasingly built on cooperation with the corporate and government powers that touch us. Playing along with that sketchy (but expensive) new treatment or being a champion of the wacky new state initiative is more likely to help your career than giving an educated but honest appraisal of actual patients' well being. The only salvation from this might be, strangely, the recession. Traditional medicine, without the consumer marketing or institutional pandering to federal...
...bring down costs? The problem with American health care, those who have studied the system will tell you, is not that we get too little care but that we use too much. By some estimates, as much as 30 cents of every health-care dollar is spent on medical treatment that is unnecessary, ineffective, duplicative or even harmful. Changing all that is going to require revamping health care from top to bottom, starting with the way health-care providers are reimbursed. While the current system pays them for the amount of care they provide, real reform would put more emphasis...