Posted on 10/20/2003 9:08:00 PM PDT by Chancellor Palpatine
Just a few decades ago cases of brain death, vegetative state, and locked-in syndrome were rare. These days, medicine's "therapeutic triumphs" have made these neurologic conditions rather frequent. For all its power to restore life and health, we now realize, modern medicine also has great potential for prolonging a dehumanizing existence for the patient.
We realize this, and we're starting to deal with it. In landmark legal cases from Karen Quinlan to Nancy Cruzan, society has come to see that it's sometimes sensible to stop treatment in patients lingering in permanent vegetative states (PVS). That progress has been hard-won and welcome. But anybody who thought that the dilemmas of PVS were troublesome hasn't seen anything yet.
The United States has thousands or tens of thousands of patients in vegetative states; nobody knows for sure exactly how many. But before long, this country will have several million patients with Alzheimer's dementia. The challenges and costs of maintaining vegetative state patients will pale in comparison to the problems presented by Alzheimer's disease.
Since women now live much longer than men, and since Alzheimer's is a disease of the elderly, most of these patients will be female. Many will spend their last years largely unaware of themselves or their surroundings.
If people really understood the reality of this dementia, I doubt they'd find it an acceptable lifestyle. Being in a state of wakeful oblivion for five to 10 years or sometimes longer is a degrading experience. The degradation is borne not so much by the patient, who may be completely unaware of him- or herself, but by the patient's family. They must endure the agony of seeing a loved one lying there year after year, often sustained only by a feeding tube.
Just as we've tried to come to grips with appropriate care of PVS patients, we've got to confront the dilemma of dealing with the demented. Comfortable solutions aren't easy to find.
So much in medicine today is driving the public towards physician-assisted suicide. Many onlookers are dismayed by doctors' fear of giving families responsibility in these cases; our failure to appreciate that families suffer a great deal too in making decisions; our archaic responses to pain and suffering; our failure to accept death as a reality and an inevitable outcome of life; our inability to be realistic and humane in treating irreversibly ill people. All of this has shaken the public's confidence in the medical profession.
People fear becoming prisoners of medical technology, and their fears are largely justified. When medicine and society refuse to face up to tough questions of treatment and honor individual values, physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia start to look like the only open exits.
Consider, for example, the case of Jamie Butcher -- a young Minnesota man of 34 who spent half his life in a vegetative state. After tending his inert body for 17 years, his parents finally made the heartbreaking choice to let him die. You couldn't find two more loving, caring, intelligent parents than Jim and Pattie Butcher. Their decision to remove Jamie's feeding tube should have been relatively simple -- and entirely private. But right-to-lifers and some disability groups fought the Butcher family every step of the way, assailing their legitimate choice to withhold futile treatment as an act of euthanasia.
This is just the sort of inflammatory talk that threatens to drive society down the path towards physician-assisted suicide. Medical organizations, courts and other groups generally agree that there are some important distinctions between stopping treatment and acting to cause a patient's death. By insisting that withdrawing a feeding tube is akin to euthanasia, these special interest groups are undermining their credibility.
And they're creating unnecessary confusion for the growing numbers of families losing a loved one to Alzheimer's. Vegetative state cases are not nearly as numerous as cases of Alzheimer's. But both kinds of cases force families to mull over the same question: When the human brain is so badly damaged that its owner can no longer think or even eat, what should be done?
This is a question families should feel free to answer for themselves -- without fearing intrusion from outsiders. And when you really think about it, the idea of placing a feeding tube in a patient with advanced Alzheimer's disease makes no sense at all, medically or morally. It borders on barbaric and cruel. It's just the kind of dehumanizing medical intervention that the public finds so distasteful. It's the sort of practice that undermines confidence that doctors have the best interests of patients and families at heart.
In Europe, feeding tubes are rarely seen in nursing homes. Once a patient is so severely brain-damaged that only artificial nutrition can sustain life, many doctors and families rightly ask, "What's the point?" In many civilized countries, the question wouldn't be asked -- because placing a feeding tube in someone with end-stage dementia wouldn't even be considered.
But here in the United States, many caregivers wouldn't consider not placing a feeding tube in the same patients.
It's hard to understand why. If we want our loved ones to live and die in dignity, we ought to think twice before suspending them in the last stage of irreversible dementia. At it is, it seems that we're not thinking at all.
-- Ronald Cranford, of Bloomington, is a neurologist at Hennepin County Medical Center and a faculty associate at the University of Minnesota's Center for Biomedical Ethics
That was really funny!! Thank you!
UM. NO. THIS is what tends to shake my confidence in the medical profession.
The above link is to a medical journal abstract from last month, advocating the removal of organs for use from brain damaged children, before they have died.
This is where the likes of Ronald Cranford and his Soros-teat-sucking cronies have gotten us.
And Ireland is a definite go because they put people in prison for helping with assisted suicide.
Where did you hear this? Not doubting you, I just like sources.
You've hit the nail on the head, Nebullis. This is still true in most of the world -- if you have the money, you receive the care; if you don't, well, you die. In America, as long as someone else (the insurance company, government, or hospital) is picking up most, if not all, of the tab, and providing the care, there is no incentive to face "the appointed time to die." What I'm concerned about is that as a way of rising keeping costs down we will go from one extreme to another -- from keeping a corpse alive on a ventilator to encouraging physican-assisted suicide (which might easily degenerate into involuntary euthanasia, as it has in Holland).
Many of the people on this board don't want to face the reality that we are not an infinitely rich nation and cannot spend the entire Gross National Product on medical care. A nation, like a family, must set priorities and cannot afford everything it wants. In childish, liberal-like fashion, they would rather name call and avoid answering the question of setting priorities.
Tell me how much one bomb we dropped on Kosovo cost and get back to me.
You are being fed a load of lies and believing it.
Someone posted the "new Hippocratic oath" which ever so delicately suggests one duty a doctor may see would be to kill. Barf retch gag vomit.
It's about the deliberate killing of the more vulnerable in our society.
OK, you can die. I'll take your share. I'm not checking out until I do it myself!
by: Dick Sobsey, Director, University of Alberta
Developmental Disabilities Centre
According to the Associated Press, Susan Smith who killed her two sons in South Carolina says that she did it out of love. She wanted to spare them the pain of a broken family and being separated from their dear mother.
Canadian newspapers have been ablaze with stories of child murder in the last week. The community was shaken with outrage as Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother confessed to killing her two young sons. At first she had tried to cover up the killing with a false story, but in the end she admitted it. According to media reports, people in the small South Carolina town were traumatized and were having problems sleeping and eating. A dozen crisis counsellors had to be called into action to manage the situation. Flowers and sympathy cards poured in from across the 50 states and Canada. President Clinton called to express his personal condolences to the community. Teddy bears and crosses began to appear at the site of the drowning as throngs of grief stricken visitors tears mingled with with the murky waters of the lake. Susan Smith was thoroughly ostracised by the community.
The shock waves reached thousands of kilometres across Canada; Here in Edmonton, a three-meter-long sympathy banner proclaiming "Canada Cares" and filled with the signatures of well wishers is being sent to South Carolina to mourn the murdered brothers. Television and newspaper pictures showed a woman who covered her face with shame. She had to be held in custody at an undisclosed location and guarded from the outraged community as screams of epithets like "baby murderer" assaulted her at every confrontation with angry citizens. Our shock, dismay, and outrage that a parent could commit such an act (Two thirds of murdered children are killed by their own parents) are healthy reactions to a horrible crime.
In another story, a little closer to home, in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, another parent is on trial for murdering his child. Like Susan Smith, Robert Latimer tried to cover the killing of his daughter with a lie, but confessed when the evidence became too strong. Like Smith, Latimer may have been under great stress. Like the community of Union, South Carolina, the community of Wilkie, Saskatchewan also reacted with sympathy and outrage, but their sympathy was for a father who confessed to killing his daughter and their outrage was directed toward the police and prosecutors who charged him with murder.
Unlike the two South Carolina brothers who were murdered, Tracy Lynn Latimer who was killed by her father was severely handicapped with cerebral palsy. Robert Latimer, her father is not ashamed and the rather than being ostracised, his friends and neighbors have taken up a collection to defend him for a "mercy-killing." Outside the courthouse where his trial began on Monday, he told reporters, "I think anyone who believes in this charge is a torture monger."
Some people may object to tying the Tracy Latimer's murder to that of Susan Smith, but the media has consistently tied it to Sue Rodriguez case which has less in common with it. It is true that unlike Michael and Alexander Smith, Tracy Latimer and Sue Rodriguez were disabled. However, unlike Sue Rodriguez, the South Carolina brothers and Tracy Latimer were all killed by their parents, and, more importantly, they never asked to be killed. Like Robert Latimer, Susan Smith says that she killed her children out of love. Which differences and which simialarities more important?
What makes the Saskatchewan case so different from the one in South Carolina? Where are the "Canada Cares" banners for children with disabilities?" Where are the flowers, cards, and teddy bears? Crimes against people with disabilities are chronically trivialized. This month, an Alberta Court of Appeals Court had to overrule the sentence of a male nurse who was given an 18 month sentence for sexually assaulting a woman who was strapped to a bed in the intensive care unit of local hospital because the original judge had given a lighter sentence because the woman's condition was considered "favorable" to the perpetrator.
We are worried about whether the violence of Power Rangers is a bad model for Canadian children, while we present a model that says its wrong for parents to kill their children unless they are disabled. Where are our tears for Tracy Latimer? Perhaps when we ask "for whom the bell tolls?" we should begin to realize that it tolls a lot louder for some children than others.
That's because socialized medicine renders senior citizens who need medical care, "obsolete". They try to get rid of them, as soon as possible. But, "everyone has health care." Health care in Europe means "everyone" can go to the doctor for free. It works great, so long as you never get anything worse than a cold or the flu.
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