Posted on 04/14/2015 1:21:06 PM PDT by Kaslin
My friend Julia died as we knew she would. Cancer had ravaged her body for a decade. She no longer could breathe. She was at home, under hospice care, when she asked for a dose of morphine that she knew would kill her but also keep her final moments free of pain.
I mention Julia's death because a blogger named Jazz Shaw took issue with my Sunday column, "Assisted Suicide -- It's Civil Rights for the Affluent." Doctors have been killing people with morphine overdoses for the past century or so, he wrote. And: "Forcing someone to suffer to the last bitter moment because you want to save them from burning in hell is not dignity."
I don't know any credible opponent of assisted suicide who opposes doctors administering needed pain control, including lethal doses if necessary. That's how medicine is supposed to work. Doctors alleviate pain. They prescribe not with the intent to kill but to stop suffering. If a patient dies from needed pain control, so be it. That's how a compassionate health care system should work.
I'm revisiting the issue because there is so much misinformation -- like Shaw's -- about the issue. I've received emails from readers who talked about loved ones who endured unwanted treatment. They don't seem to know that patients have the right to refuse medical treatment.
Last week, I watched ALS patient Christina Symonds, 43, assert that she does not want to live her "last days in a wheelchair, fully paralyzed, connected to a breathing machine."
"She can refuse a breathing machine," bioethics professor Bill Hurlbut, of Stanford University, told me. Also: "The argument that ALS is a very terrible way to die -- you have to feel for that argument; you have to feel the sadness of that. But the alternative is" to turn medicine away from being a healing profession. "The minute we start participating in promoting the end of life with the intention of ending it, then we have a different relationship with the patient, and fear will enter the equation when people enter the hospital."
So let me repeat: Doctors can and should use pain control to alleviate pain and suffering. Palliative sedation is available to those who fear a bad end. And patients are free to refuse treatment -- an important right. These safeguards do not guarantee the sort of choreographed final moments that "death with dignity" advocates seem to think they will get if more states legalize physician-assisted suicide; they do give patients the wherewithal to make the most of their last years, months or days. A hospice near me has the perfect motto: "Design a better ending."
If you remove disinformation about inadequate palliative care and treatments being forced on people, advocates are left with one argument: Choice. They say they should be able to choose when they die. I agree, but if you want to kill yourself, no government can stop you. This point tends to enrage advocates, who feel that they have the right to choose when they die and have someone else help them. They want to pervert health care to cater to their perfect death ceremonies. That is their sorry idea of dignity.
Those who say don’t know
Those who know don’t say
My 92 year old mother was on a breathing machine and could not be removed. She was suffering terribly. She was given morphine and the machine turned off. She closed her eyes and passed away quietly and peacefully. It was a blessing.
Lethal doses are not medicine, they are murder
That's my favorite quote from the Tao Te Ching, although it's not the same in all translations. It applies to many things.
These things are not just black and white.
Doctors should not be killing people. Period.
THERE EXISTS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands.…What really happens in this case is that the individual is overcome and crushed by a death deprived of any prospect of meaning or hope. We see a tragic expression of all this in the spread of euthanasia-disguised and surreptitious, or practised openly and even legally. As well as for reasons of a misguided pity at the sight of the patient’s suffering, euthanasia is sometimes justified by the utilitarian motive of avoiding costs which bring no return and which weigh heavily on society. Thus it is proposed to eliminate malformed babies, the severely handicapped, the disabled, the elderly, especially when they are not self-sufficient, and the terminally ill. Pope John-Paul II, —Evangelium Vitae §15
We don’t let our pets suffer, yet we let our loved ones suffer. I am torn on this issue.
Lethal doses are not medicine, they are murder
So if you’re the doctor, you let them lie there, screaming and writhing in pain, because you know that the amount of morphine or whatever, needed to relieve the pain, will kill them?
Is that it?
Doctors should not be killing people. Period.
So if you’re the doctor, you let them lie there, screaming and writhing in pain, because you know that the amount of morphine or whatever, needed to relieve the pain, will kill them?
Is that it?
Let the patient or someone else do it, doctors and nurses should not.
“So if you’re the doctor, you let them lie there, screaming and writhing in pain, because you know that the amount of morphine or whatever, needed to relieve the pain, will kill them?”
Those who say, don’t know
Those who know, don’t say.
My mother was dying; her own body killed her. The doctors just made her passage comfortable.
Let the patient or someone else do it, doctors and nurses should not.
And if a family member (non-doctor)injects them and they die, what are the chances they would charged with murder?
And how does a doctor legally just give a Schedule II drug to a non-patient?
Well you can thank Big Pharma that you cannot easily get Cannibis oil which is curing cancer right and left.
I know and I will say. No one will like it. No one.
I spent nearly a decade of my life in neurosurgery. Been there, done that. Got a shelf full of coffe cups. Used to have a closet full of scrubs. The mind set required had to be 100% affirmative. You had to counsel the family at or near the point of utter futility but until everyone was agreed you have to be “all in”. To get up at three AM after two hours sleep in the last 40 and go to the bedside as the ICP climbs into the 80s and the vent requires 15 cm to deliver any volume and try to “do some magic” is impossible otherwise. As much as I would rather not YOU deserve it.
To undercut this rationale, this philosophy of the “healing art” turns it into something none of us wants or has any use for. Mercy on a case by case basis when appropriate is justifiable and my conscience is clear. Accuse me of playing god, if you will but someone has to do these things. When my time comes I want to get as good as I gave. I want to be able to look my doctor in the eye and know that he is still “all in” if I am.
Ah, and the mythology of cannabis grows.
There is no proof that cannabis does anything curative, but plenty of proof that it is harmful. There is, furthermore, reason to think that marijuana is a carcinogen.
All of the scientific evidence doesn't matter: with marijuana, the push is for use based on anecdotal rumors. That's not the way drugs should be included in the pharmacopeia!
BTW, there is a marijuana oil (THC) extract that is prescribed and sold. It is, of course, packaged, quality checked, and sold by pharmaceutical companies.
But, as you point out, when your ICP is in the 80s and you're on 15 cm of PEEP, you won't be able to do that, and, if your doctor is your REAL doctor and not a guy at the other end of the helicopter flight path, he will have to make some decisions.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.