70? Why not 30?
Posted on 01/06/2007 4:08:26 PM PST by Brilliant
Last year a primary care trust announced it would take smokers off waiting lists for surgery in an attempt to contain costs. In this week's British Medical Journal, two experts go head to head over whether smokers should be refused surgery.
Denying operations is justified for specific conditions, argues Professor Matthew Peters from the Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Australia.
Professor Peters says that smoking up to the time of any surgery increases cardiac and pulmonary complications, impairs tissue healing, and is associated with more infections.
These effects increase the costs of care and also mean less opportunity to treat other patients, he writes. In healthcare systems with finite resources, preferring non-smokers over smokers for a limited number of procedures will therefore deliver greater clinical benefit to individuals and the community.
He believes that, as long as everything is done to help patients to stop smoking, it is both responsible and ethical to implement a policy that those unwilling or unable to stop should have low priority for, or be excluded from, certain elective procedures.
But Professor Leonard Glantz from Boston University School of Public Health believes it is unacceptable discrimination. "It is astounding that doctors would question whether they should treat smokers," he says.
"Doctors should certainly inform patients that they might reduce their risks of post-surgical complications if they stop smoking before the procedure. But should the price of not following the doctor's advice be the denial of beneficial surgery?"
Cost arguments are made to support the discriminatory non-treatment of smokers. But why focus our cost saving concerns on smokers? Patients are not required to visit fitness clubs, lose 25 pounds, or take drugs to lower blood pressure before surgery. And many non-smokers cost society large sums of money in health care because of activities they choose to take part in.
Discriminating against smokers has become an acceptable norm, he writes. It is shameful for doctors to be willing to treat everybody but smokers in a society that is supposed to be pluralistic and tolerant. Depriving smokers of surgery that would clearly enhance their wellbeing is not just wrong -- it is mean, he concludes.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by BMJ-British Medical Journal.
Let them get behind the illegal aliens for the "free" health care.
ping
One word: AIDS.
Running out the door right now
Ping for Later
This game will not end with Smokers, you are so right Brilliant.
let 'em just TRY to stop surgery for active homosexuals. ha!
Why not just kill everyone over 70? < /S >
How about queers... the retarded... gypsies?
Why indeed? In Joe Haldeman's Forever War the government simply stopped providing medical services when someone hit the age of 70. "That's enough life for you."
It has been said before but it bears repeating - when medicine is practiced for money the practitioner has a motive to treat. When medicine is treated as a fixed quantity and rationed out the practitioner has a motive not to treat. Which system really serves the patient's best interest?
What a bunch of BS!!! No one said a word when they gave Mickey Mantel a new organ after YEARS of alcohol abuse. And put him ahead of so many others who had been on a list much longer..... my opinion of course!!
I'm waiting for Gore to blame ALL of the global warming on the ills of cigarette smoke. Fooey! It's all a bunch of fooey!
Nana
If we can give medical care for AIDS, to faggots who CHOOSE THEIR lifestyle, then smokers being denied care are clearly being discriminated against.
Personally, I don't mind the burden that mothers of child-bearing age are placing on medical insurance premiums, thereby I am paying for their leaning on the system, too, but if we are going to single out smokers as NON-COVERED, then we are having an unfairness issue.
Beat me to it.
Why are you only singling out DEMOCRAT VOTERS?
HA!
70? Why not 30?
I'm suprised smokers even want to have surgery since they obviously don't give a rip about their health.
Just wait. Socialized medicine will also include the old and elderly in this.
Fat people, dumb people, ugly people, religious people, rightwingers, etc...
I see "survival of the fittest" taking on new meaning.
The game is already played. I have seen emergency room specialists ration out their time based on the age of patient. We are heading for the time where only the rich will be able to exclude themselves from some manual or fee schedule that determines who has the "right" to certain care or procedures.
DING DING DING DING we have a winner
lets see what happens when somebody says we shouldn't treat aids patients because ....
If they are going to do this, than they had better outlaw tobacco first.
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