well, bye
Thanks Jim. I couldn’t believe they posted that here.
Mariner specifically wrote about the comment that one patients died of overdoses, when the article is about attempts to control pain.
Brian is the instigator, here. He posted this, pinged his buddies, and then called you for help when he got the response he expected. The original post wasn’t aimed at you, only a rude accusation by Kopp.
There are real murderers out there, but this discussion and the original post are not about them. Kopp wants this to be about the care that includes pain control, too.
I am one of those doctors - an MD with an ethics degree, - who is accused of euthanasia because of pain control and other judicious, medically and ethically thought out care. I’m also pilloried by the utilitarian “bioethics” who assume intentional and even involuntary killing should be in the doctor’s job description.
The fear of pain is the usual reason for advocates of intentional euthanasia. The accusation that pain control necessarily involves killing the patient is flat out wrong and Brian knows it. I’ll bet that as a podiatrist, he’s used pain killers, even opiates.
Jim, thank you for your action dealing with this euthanasia issue.
I lost my mother due to withholding of food and water that I could not stop due to issues whose details I'm not going to discuss publicly on the internet. Much has already been said on this thread with which I fully agree, and there's no need to repeat my own story which is all too similar.
I learned two things from that incident.
One was the importance of getting a good lawyer who shares pro-life convictions and understands the potential loopholes which doctors can exploit in “living wills,” and even then, reading every single word of anything that gets signed.
The other was a greatly increased respect for the role of Roman Catholic hospitals in end-of-life issues. My mother trusted her once-evangelical denomination, and when she woke up from a coma, without understanding what would happen, left the intensive care unit of a Roman Catholic hospital and fell into the hands of a hospice founded by one of the worst liberal professors at the official college of her denomination, a man whose evil theology I had fought against for nearly a decade. She thought she was going into a nursing home with care comparable to the hospital if needed, but once she lost consciousness, she was starved to death and nothing could be done because of what she had signed, despite very clear verbal statements made in the presence of several witnesses including me and an elder’s wife.
Not going to say more details here, Jim, but I want to commend you for what you wrote. Theology has consequences, and when it comes to abortion and euthanasia, those consequences can easily be fatal.
We simply cannot trust our doctors or our lawyers to have our best interests at heart; even if they mean well, they don't necessarily share our values, and lawyers may not understand loopholes in areas outside their ordinary scope of professional practice. The documents we sign could be our own death warrants if we're not careful.