Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whatever frantic doctoring occurred during / Remember Mama's arduous journey toward opening night, the patient is dead on arrival...
...lipped doctors but the increasing complexity of medical care. No longer is all treatment provided at home or in physicians' offices. It is administered at hospitals or clinics, where nurses, lab technicians, therapists, pharmacists and other functionaries join with doctors in building mountains of medical information about the patient. To complicate matters, the patient does not pick up the hospital tab directly. That is done by insurance companies or government agencies, so-called third parties, all of whom claim a legitimate right to look into what they are paying...
...Even if patients object to violations of their privacy, they cannot prevent them since hospitals and insurance companies commonly insist that patients sign "any and all" release forms as a precondition of treatment. These give the institutions virtually a free hand to distribute information from a patient's files. Nor do the limited restrictions that exist provide much assurance of secrecy. Information can often be ferreted out of computer memories by anyone with access to a terminal. The curious can also enter busy hospital record rooms by simply passing themselves off as doctors. Besides learning about a patient...
...allow release of information for such worthy scientific purposes as inquiries into the effectiveness of a particular drug on the course of a disease. But they would prohibit the kind of blanket, open-ended authorizations that are contained in the any-and-all forms. What is more, the patient, who is now practically the only one kept in the dark about his medical records, would finally be allowed to examine them, either directly or through an intermediary. Penalties for obtaining the information under false pre tenses would be relatively stiff: up to a year in jail, a fine...
...Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Solomon Snyder and his colleagues, Ian Creese and Dr. Larry Tune, have developed a simple blood test that should be especially useful in treating the nation's estimated 2 million to 5 million schizophrenics. Already tested on 30 patients, it is based on pioneering studies of the brain's receptors, or molecular sites to which its own drug-like chemicals bind-almost as if they were keys in a lock. A blood sample from a patient is added to a tube containing animal brain tissue and a radioactively tagged chemical known to bind...