Word: turned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When Raymond Cerniglia's 13-year-old son Matthew developed a rare and aggressive cancer, doctors gave him a 20% chance to live and started an 11-month course of chemotherapy. Cerniglia's HMO paid the bills at first. But when things took a turn for the worse and doctors ordered a bone-marrow transplant, the health plan refused to cover it. The new treatment, the administrators said, wasn't a "medical necessity," nor was it on their list of covered therapies. Despite a letter from an expert at the National Institutes of Health testifying that this was Matthew...
Whichever way the Viagra wars turn out, there is no going back. Gatekeepers and cost controls will always be with us. In the end, each of us is going to have to learn to play the managed-care game. And if we can't get what we need from our health plans, we're going to have to speak up, not just to the nurses and doctors but to our employers as well. After all, they're the ones that picked our plans and pay the premiums. And they're the ones with the financial clout to change the rules...
...Both Clinton and the Republicans would give patients new outside avenues for appeal when their health plans deny them care, more information to help them select doctors, and assurances that they won't be stuck with the bill when the chest pains that send them to the emergency room turn out to be indigestion. Women are guaranteed the right to see a gynecologist; doctors, the right to advise their patients when expensive new procedures are better than the ones allowed under their health plan...
Fortunately, GERD has a cure. For years doctors tried to minimize the problem with antacids. Then they turned to drugs like Tagamet and Pepcid to block a biochemical signal that sets off acid production. Neither of these remedies, now available over the counter, can turn off the stomach's acid-making machinery at the source, however. That's where a new group of prescription medications, called proton pump inhibitors, comes in. "You don't just get better on these pills," Dannenberg exults, "you actually return to normal." And because the drugs are activated only in the acid environment...
...where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment to which they are also drawn. A girl asks her dyspeptic beau, "Will you trust me?" and he says, "If you'll trust me first." They...