Word: patient
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...could easily be the plot to an episode of "Medical Center," but such situations have led to a real-life drama currently playing in the courts and hospitals of Massachusetts. Due to recent technological and medical advances that enable doctors to keep patients on the brink of death alive and to treat with limited success the previously incurable, doctors and lawyers are for the first time tackling the question, "Who, if anyone, should pull the plug?" In the case of an incompetent patient--such as the very young, the unconscious, or the mentally retarded--who should take on the awesome...
...courts of Massachusetts saw differently. The following year, in the case of Joseph Saikewicz, a severely mentally retarded patient who was dying of leukemia, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts delegated the courts find authority in the right-to-die decision, and touched off a heated battle between the legal and medical professions...
...Saikewicz case. Doctors maintained the case simply involved a medical question, and it would be a dangerous precedent for courts to interfere with doctors' traditional autonomy in such matters. They argued that society has given the medical profession the responsibility of determining the efficacy of treatments and a patient's chances of survival, and thus they must be the ones to make the right-to-die decision...
...lawyers believed such a case, with no patient consent, was a legal matter. It involved one individual taking the life of another, and required the impartial weighing of all the relevant facts to determine what the patient would have wanted, which only a court can accomplish. The relevant facts would include expert medical testimony, the best estimates of the values and beliefs of the patient concerning medical care, and the pain that he would have to endure without knowing...
...Intensive care units, whether for newborn infants, postsurgical patients or those with heart problems, provide, as the name implies, constant surveillance and therapy. Because they have the most sophisticated gadgetry outside the operating room and require a staff-to-patient ratio twice that needed elsewhere in the hospital, they are very expensive services to run. The intensive care unit accounts for about 15% of all hospital costs. Coronary care units may charge $400 to $500 a day. Yet, say some doctors, no one is sure whether survival rates are higher than would occur with care in regular hospital beds. Some...