You are cross posting. My comments were limited to the description of the statute and the posts that have been directed toward me. I don't know or particularly care who everyone was or what they agreed on.
No one defended including it in a definition of "medical treatment" that can be withheld.
My criticism was of the statute as it is described in the article.
We all agreed on a bill that would have made sure that this law was never used in the future to withhold or withdraw food and water.
Good, but your droning hyperbole in your previous post to me made no such qualification.
In fact, the current law has never been used to withhold or withdraw food and water in Texas.
Irrelevant to my criticism of the statute or your weak defense of it.
Each of the cases I mentioned are actual cases, they are not fictitious.
They were extreme examples dripping with your pro-death hyperbole. It doesn't matter whether they were fictitious or not.
While you may be willing to give up your bed in the ICU for a patient whose family refuses to care for their loved one at home or at the nursing home, sacrifice should be preceded by "self."
Your logic is lacking. The real or make believe problem of an imaginary intensive care bed shortage and whether we need more beds is totally independent or your pro-death blather. Furthermore, personal qualifications are meaningless on an anonymous discussion forum like this one so your fallacious appeal to hypocrisy is completely fraudulent.
The State cannot demand that doctors sacrifice themselves or other patients.
This is nothing but a Red Herring. No state has ever done so. Keeping these people who want to live alive sacrifices neither the doctor or the patient. Anyone so perverse to even think this way is worthy of pity.
Are you willing to sacrifice other patients?
No, but based on what you have written here, you and other hack doctors like you certainly are willing to sacrifice patients.
Are you willing to make every doctor a slave to the State?
Your hysterics are comical. Prohibiting them from killing people who want to live is not enslavement.
The infant whose ribs and skull wouldn't grow was having lung damage due to the ventilator pressure needed to push the oxygen in his lungs that were compressed by those ribs.
None or your pathetic examples justifies killing innocent people who want to live.
People do not live on blood pressure increasing medicines - "pressors," such as dopamine and dobutamine - for years.
This doesn't in any way justify incompetent third rate doctors like you being allowed kill them.
For one thing, they are always and only used in the ICU setting.
So what. The more you write the clearer it becomes that you and your ilk are more concerned with costs than lives. You seem to be on the edge of calling these patients "worthless eaters."
For another, the side effects kill the tissue in the fingers, toes, it puts every area that normally develops bed sores even more at risk and greatly, greatly increases risk of strokes, kidney damage and heart attacks.
None of this justifies lazy and incompetent doctors like you being allowed to kill them.
In the case of the man who demanded frequent blood transfusions, the breakdown of the blood cells transfused were damaging his liver and kidneys and he required more frequent application of the harmful substance.
A sad side effect of living in this condition. If doctors in Texas spent more time trying to keep their patients alive rather than killing them, a more sustainable treatment might be found.
How often will you force me to cause suffering,
Giving people the life sustaining treatment they desire is not causing suffering. Only a lazy megalomaniac would make such an absurd statement.
to make doctors slaves or automatons who follow orders to the radical autonomy of another?
The natural desire to live is radical autonomy? If I knew where you lived, I would send you a Get Well Soon card!
Finally, there is no "oath." The Hippocratic Oath is sworn to Apollo and would prohibit surgery to remove a stone. Few medical schools have any sort of oath these days.
It sounds like your medical school required students to make an oath to Satan! Seriously, if you are really a medical professional and truly believe the rubbish you have written here, you are in the wrong line of work. May God have mercy on you, and especially on your patients.
As I said in my first response, see post # 15. Although, thank the Lord, the Act has never been used to remove food and water, the substitute Bill that everyone agreed to in the Lieutenant Governor’s office that day, and which the Senate passed, would have made sure that the Advance Directive Act was never used to remove or withhold food and water. The dems in the House effectively killed the bill, by grandstanding and stalling.
I hope we can get the tweaks passed in ‘09. In the meantime, the TMA, the Hospital Association and several regulatory agencies have agreed to work to include them in “best practices.” And, I assume, the Coalition will continue to meet to strengthen the improvements that are needed.
A sound bite that rings true. FV