hospitals

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

Museums are like sports stadiums, hotels and hospitals: they are in the category of captive-audience dining.

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station__ll noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.

They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signalled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic.

Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.

They ought to bury people in hospitals and let sick people get well in the cemeteries.

Ouch. What is that?___ater, you wimp._ Humor colored his tone and when I looked up, he was smirking again, but this time it was different. He was beaming, radiating__ike he used to.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

Ritual abuse diagnosis research _ excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients_ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. __n fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion._ Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Emergency Rooms ... were the nightmares your nightmares had while they slept.

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded.There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians.'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly.I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself.

The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.

The drugs took over and she fell asleep then.Only her face was visible, the medical equipment acting as some hideous hijab for her.

The U.S. has a so-called health care system that has nothing to do with the promotion of health. Those who run this system do not care about your health, and it's far from being a system. It's a fragmented patchwork of procedure-oriented services that are meshed in a voluminous trail of paper payments, with little relevance to community-based needs. This misdirected, disease-managed non-care system of symptom suppression demands more and more treatment at higher and higher costs. If they cared at all, you'd be treated like a human, not like a number resembling, quite frankly, the ear tags on a cattle herd.

It costs about the same to house a maximum-security young adult prisoner for a year as it does to send his law-abiding counterpart to Harvard.

Dr Power stood up. __ecause your staff are not components that can be fitted in, or replaced when they are unpredictable, or when they are simply being human. Because our patients are not playing a game called __usiness_ with profit and loss and winners and losers. Because patients have no choice, but to be patients and it__ our privilege to be in a temporary position where we can help them. And, inevitably, when we ourselves fall ill; when we grow old, then we can only hope that we will receive the help we ourselves need in turn. Because that__ the reality of life. And not some self-aggrandising game". - Dr Power, speaking in The Good Shepherd