Posted on 08/31/2009 4:08:29 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 31, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A doctor has admitted that he gave orders for a lethal dose of medication to be administered to a patient under his care during the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 - a decision that he says he does not regret having made.
Dr. Ewing Cook said that as staff at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans were struggling to evacuate patients from the flooded building, he gave the order to give Jannie Burgess, 79, who was dying of uterine cancer and kidney failure, a dose of morphine that he knew would kill her.
"Do you mind just increasing the morphine and giving her enough until she goes?" Cook said he asked the patient's nurse, and then wrote "Pronounced dead at" on the patient's chart and left it blank to be filled in later.
Cook described the "double effect" of morphine, which is frequently used to control severe pain or discomfort but can also slow breathing and, if suddenly introduced in much higher doses, lead to death.
"If you don't think that by giving a person a lot of morphine you're not prematurely sending them to their grave, then you're a very naïve doctor," Cook said.
"To me, it was a no-brainer, and to this day I don't feel bad about what I did," Cook told ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization.
"There's no question I hastened her demise," he said. "I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor."
Cook also described another area of the hospital that was crowded with patients on cots and stretchers where he considered euthanizing the ones that had "do not resuscitate (DNR)" on their charts. "We didn't do it because we had too many witnesses," he told ProPublica. "That's the honest-to-God truth."
Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell told AP he would not reopen an investigation launched by his predecessor, Charles Foti, because of the disclosures by Dr. Cook.
In that investigation another doctor and two nurses were arrested on charges of second-degree homicide, but a Grand Jury declined to indict them.
Dr. Anna Pou, a surgeon who specializes in working with cancer patients, and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, who had admitted to administering lethal doses of medication to patients during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, were offered immunity from prosecution by Attorney General Foti, before testifying to a Grand Jury that four patients died after being administered what Foti called a "lethal cocktail" of drugs.
Dr. Pou denied the charges, insisting that she did not support euthanasia and claimed to have given only comfort care for the patients.
However, court documents asserted that witnesses had testified that Dr. Pou and the two nurses took syringes full of drugs to a ward for the chronically-ill and injected four patients. Thirty-four patients died in Memorial Medical Center following the Katrina disaster, more than in any comparable-sized hospital in the drowned city.
A coroner's report stated that more than half of the bodies taken from Memorial tested positive for morphine or midazolam, or both. Robert Middleberg, the director of the toxicology laboratory where the autopsy samples were tested, said the high drug concentrations found in many of the patients stuck out "like a sore thumb."
The ProPublica report cites University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who, after reviewing the records of the patients who died and the coroner's report, concluded that nine patients were euthanized, and that the way the drugs were given was "not consistent with the ethical standards of palliative care that prevail in the United States." Those standards are clear, Caplan wrote, in that the death of a patient cannot be the goal of a doctor's treatment.
The complete investigative article from ProPublica is available here.
See related LSN coverage:
Doctor and Two Nurses Arrested For Hurricane Katrina "Euthanasia" Nightmare
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jul/06071806.html
Doctor Charged in Katrina Deaths Denies Committing Murder, Euthanasia
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06092502.html
New Orleans Doctors Kill Patients Rather Than Leave Them to Looters, Then Flee
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05091205.html
Court Documents: Hospital Gave Lethal Injections to Patients During Hurricane Katrina
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jul/05071204.html
Only a godless leftist would view a natural disaster as an opportunity to kill people.
Pro-Life Ping
Sounds like Obama has found his next Surgeon General.
Freepmail wagglebee or DirtyHarryY2K to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
And people think that since the actual words "DEATH PANEL" are not in the bill that it means there won't be any.
Obama’s new “Death Panel Czar” or Director of Medicare?
He should have his license to practice medicine revoked and be charged with homicide
“I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster”
No, you didn’t give her “medicine”, you gave her poison and murdered her.
Morphine is a commonly administered “pain killer” while the elderly patient “dies”. Happens every day in USA.
I don’t know why Zero doesn’t just quit calling them czars and call them fuhrers.
Wow is that compassion or what!!
Then his comment about too many witnesses only served to make this seem like a business decision rather than a moral one.
Having been in the USAF, I know hard decisions must be made and I don't fault him for that. I just think he should have evaluated the situation on a higher moral plane than his comments suggest.
Yeh, these guys were just on Obama’s agenda before Obama was elected. Should be honored by the libbies.
I'm not really sure why you are using quotation marks, morphine really is a pain killer and the dead really do die.
But to your main point, the question is INTENT. NOBODY is disputing that palliative care/pain management is an inexact science and it is not uncommon for the very sick to die as the result of too much morphine. This does happen every day and I wouldn't presume to question the judgment of the physician because this happens to EVERY physician who specializes in terminal illnesses (and I've talked to a great many physicians in this field).
However, when the doctor PURPOSELY gives an overdose with the INTENT to KILL THE PATIENT, it is MURDER.
UNLESS the patient is a baby.
UNLESS the patient is a baby.
My 90 year old mother, who has very advanced Alzheimers, was sent home a year and a half ago to spend the last few days of her life in her bed with hospice support after a bout with pneumonia. My wife, who is her primary caregiver (and has been for over 6 years) refused to give her the prescribed Morphine since there was no evidence of pain. My Mother is still hanging in there and has the sweetest smile
The killing of the elderly has been going on for years in our nursing homes and hospitals with just a simple signature on the bottom of the chart.
I can imagine a situation (military triage)
where limited resources are available to take care of
an overwhelming number of injured.
I can see the natural disaster as a
type of military situation
There have been battlefield situations
where a fellow soldier has shot his comrade
when there is no hope.
Burning in a fire, for example
I can make a case for a family member
doing that in this situation.
Still, morphine is not given to purposely kill a patient.
Care may be withdrawn to redirect resources
to those considered to be survivable.
Purposefully killing is beyond the pale
and in breach of the Hippocratic Oath
a Doctor cannot purposefully kill
His Oath is unmade, and
he is no longer a Physician
Every now and again one hears about a state having trouble carrying out a lethal-injection execution because they can’t find a doctor willing to participate (pronouncing the executee dead, for example).
Sign this guy up for those jobs.
>> Those standards are clear, Caplan wrote, in that the death of a patient cannot be the goal of a doctor’s treatment.
...not yet, anyhow. Maybe in a few months, if Ezekiel Emmanuel and Bambi get their way.
I can see doing this if it was a case of being unable to evacuate and haveing to leave her to drown, or a case in which a a person was injured beyond hope on a battlefield or in a disaster,but this just because the doctor didn’t want to be bothered
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.