Word: physician
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...despondent husband wonders why his wife fails to respond to him during lovemaking. To his genuine astonishment, he learns from a physician that he was not accomplishing much of anything by stimulating his wife's navel. The naive husband may sound like a caricature concocted at a sex therapists' meeting, but for Mikhail Stern, a dissident Soviet physician now living in France, the story is poignantly symptomatic of the woeful sexual lives of most Soviet citizens...
...medical student, I found myself agreeing with the Boston specialist about the physician's right to charge high fees. It's disheartening to realize that while the public apparently demands perfection in technique and diagnosis, it pays for it rather grudgingly...
...macabre irony. His last purge was to have been a mammoth pogrom. The pretext was the spurious charge that the Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, were poisoning political luminaries in their care. In his terminal paranoia, Stalin came to believe in the plot and suspected that his personal physician was a British agent. As blood vessels began to burst inside his own brain, plunging him into a prolonged agony, the dictator would not let any doctor near him on his deathbed...
These typical cases represent violations of one of medicine's sacred trusts: the patient's right to privacy. Under a credo that goes back to the Hippocratic oath, a physician is required to keep silent about what he is told or learns of a patient's condition. But lately the tradition is being more honored in the breach...
...case of the CAT scanner, for instance, most doctors would agree with the Boston physician who observes: "It has all but relieved us of doing angiograms or putting air into people's brains. Both of those had an element of risk and were not nearly so accurate as the CAT." But when it comes to the usefulness of whole body scanning there is considerably more disagreement, even though evidence is mounting in the machine's favor. Another important question is how many of the devices the country needs, and can afford...