podiatrists and-- the'a hugeist, it fills three pages-- that group of activities is rising. why have the costs risen so precipitously? for one thing, the medical scene itself has changed. william schwartz: as a young physician just starting, i thought we were doing wonderful things. in retrospect, it's so clear to me now how limited we were. and none of us could have imagined the changes that have takeplac between then and now. let me give you one ample: in the old days, what would happen is, if you had undiagnosed abdominal pain, we did what was called an exploratory laparotomy, which means that you open the patient's abdomen from the top of his abdomen, from his chest, all the way to the pelvis. and then the surgeon-- and i don't mean this critically, really-- but they had to poke around through the whole abdomen, feeling each organ to see if you could find something that was abnormal. mostf the time it wasn't rth doing, because the risk/pain factor overrode the likelihood of finding anything, particularly if t likelihood... was remote-- retively remote. wellthink of what'