Word: artificiales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
The Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville, where the operation took place, has received permission from the Food and Drug Administration to perform another five artificial-heart implants. One candidate is now in the hospital for evaluation, but will most likely be turned down. At the same time, two Southern girls...
Dr. Thomas Starzl, a noted transplant surgeon at the University Health Center in Pittsburgh, argues that "the cost of transplants is no higher than the cost of dying from severe diseases of vital organs." A patient can run up expenses of $250,000 before getting a liver transplant, Starzl points...
Organ transplants are by no means the only miracle cures provided by high-tech medicine. A hemophiliac's Autoplex injections, which stimulate blood coagulation, can cost up to $100,000 to keep him alive for three months. Dialysis machines for kidney patients, which pump the blood through an artificial cleansing...
The number who could benefit from artificial or transplanted hearts is usually estimated at 50,000 per year, possibly 75,000. Multiplying 50,000 cases by an average cost of, say, $150,000 per operation comes to a breathtaking total of $7.5 billion annually.
"But where has all the money gone?" asks one of Rushmer's colleagues, James Speer, a professor of biomedical history at Washington. "We are not living all that much longer. These expenditures can't be understood in the health of people, but in the creation of a very large industry...