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Dehydrate dementia patients to death to save money: British Medical Journal editorial
LifeSiteNews ^ | 07/16/12 | Hilary White

Posted on 07/16/2012 6:10:54 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM

Dehydrate dementia patients to death to save money: British Medical Journal editorial

by Hilary White, Rome CorrespondentMon Jul 16, 2012 15:38 EST

July 16, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The courts should not interfere with doctors who want to dehydrate to death incapacitated patients who are a drain on scarce financial resources, according to an editorial in this week’s edition of the prestigious British Medical Journal.

Raanan Gillon, emeritus professor of medical ethics and former chairman of the Institute of Medical Ethics governing body, wrote that a ruling last year by the High Court against dehydrating an incapacitated patient to death was “profoundly disturbing” because it took the life and death decision-making power out of the hands of doctors and required that the principle of the “sanctity of life” take precedence over other considerations.

The judgment, he said, “threaten[s] to skew the delivery of severely resource-limited healthcare services towards providing non-beneficial or minimally beneficial life prolonging treatments including artificial nutrition and hydration to thousands of severely demented patients whose families and friends believe they would not have wanted such treatment”.

He complained that the ruling required that, under the “stringent” Mental Capacity Act, in order to remove “life prolonging treatment” like a feeding and hydration tube, the patient himself must have left a legally binding “advance decision” in writing, and that previous casual or unrecorded statements to relatives were not sufficient grounds. 

The editorial, titled, “Sanctity of life law has gone too far,” said that unless it is overturned, the court ruling “will gradually and detrimentally distort healthcare provision, healthcare values, and common sense.”

Its logical implication, Gillon wrote, is that “doctors should no longer decide, in consultation with those who know their incapacitated patients, whether life prolonging treatment including artificial nutrition and hydration will be in their patients’ best interests.”

Furthermore, he said, the ruling logically means that those patients in “a higher than minimal state of consciousness must be similarly protected”.

The court ruling in question was that in the M Case, in which the family of a 52-year-old woman who was found to be in a “minimally conscious state” and who was “otherwise clinically stable,” were petitioning the court to have her feeding and hydration tube removed. The Court of Protection ruled that all patients in such a state must be referred individually to the Court of Protection if “life prolonging treatment” by artificial nutrition and hydration is to be withheld or withdrawn.

Mr. Justice Baker said in the September 2011 decision, “The factor which does carry substantial weight, in my judgment, is the preservation of life. Although not an absolute rule, the law regards the preservation of life as a fundamental principle.”

Justice Baker wrote that the courts should not “attach significant weight” to the patient’s previous statements unless they had been expressed in a way that could stand up to legal scrutiny. As in the case of Terri Schiavo in the U.S., M’s family had argued that her alleged previous statements indicated that she would not want to be dependent on such care.

Baker responded to this by ruling, “[Given] the importance of the sanctity of life, and the fatal consequences of withdrawing treatment, and the absence of an advance decision that complied with the requirements previously specified by the common law and now under statute, it would in my judgment be wrong to attach significant weight to those statements made prior to her collapse.”

Anthony Ozimic, communications manager for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said that the ideology being espoused by Gillon and the British Medical Journal is indistinguishable from the materialist utilitarian ethic that led to the elimination of the “unfit” by eugenicists in the early 20th century, including in pre-World War II Germany. 

“What is particularly disturbing about Professor Gillon’s opinions is that he is judging certain disabled people as having lives unworthy of life, balancing those lives against the needs of other patients and seeking to justify killing the disabled on the grounds of rationing,” Ozimic told LifeSiteNews.com.

“Such a utilitarian calculus is in substance no difference to the calculus made during World War II by the German authorities: that the disabled should die so that wounded soldiers could live. In any case, assisted food and fluids are basic nursing care, not futile medical treatments.”

As shocking as such pronouncements are to the general public, the idea that disabled patients should be euthanized, either directly or by the removal of food and hydration, is actually a mainstream of thought among many of the western world’s medical ethicists. Gillon himself is a major voice in the field as a former editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics and the author of the 1985 book “Philosophical Medical Ethics”.

Classical medical ethics, that held as paramount the principle “Do no harm,” has in large part been set aside in favor of the new utilitarian-based Bioethics, a formal or “normative” branch of ethical philosophy that seeks “the greatest good for the greatest number” according to the “principles” of “justice, beneficence and autonomy”.



TOPICS: Extended News; Front Page News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: cultureofcorruption; deathcare; deathpanels; deathpanels4all; euthanasia; healthcare; hillarycare; moralabsolutes; nazism; obamacare; prolife; romneycare; romneydeathpanels; socializedmedicine; terrischiavo; zot
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To: Doe Eyes

Apparently, everyone hasn’t been as lucky in life’s lottery as you seem to be.


61 posted on 07/16/2012 8:22:49 PM PDT by basil (Second Amendment Sisters.org)
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To: Doe Eyes

Do you think everyone who doesn’t have “money” is a Fricking deadbeat? Do you think everybody has hundreds of thousands of dollars laying around?


62 posted on 07/16/2012 8:22:55 PM PDT by kelly4c (http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=2900389%2C41#help)
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To: zot

History will show that ObamaCare is to euthanasia what Roe V Wade was to abortion.


63 posted on 07/16/2012 8:23:23 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM
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Comment #64 Removed by Moderator

To: cherry
CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH

RESPONSES TO CERTAIN QUESTIONS
OF THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS
CONCERNING ARTIFICIAL NUTRITION AND HYDRATION

 

First question: Is the administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a “vegetative state” morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or cannot be administered to the patient without causing significant physical discomfort?

Response: Yes. The administration of food and water even by artificial means is, in principle, an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life. It is therefore obligatory to the extent to which, and for as long as, it is shown to accomplish its proper finality, which is the hydration and nourishment of the patient. In this way suffering and death by starvation and dehydration are prevented.

Second question: When nutrition and hydration are being supplied by artificial means to a patient in a “permanent vegetative state”, may they be discontinued when competent physicians judge with moral certainty that the patient will never recover consciousness?

Response: No. A patient in a “permanent vegetative state” is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means.

 

The Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI, at the Audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved these Responses, adopted in the Ordinary Session of the Congregation, and ordered their publication.

Rome, from the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, August 1, 2007.

William Cardinal Levada
Prefect

Angelo Amato, S.D.B.
Titular Archbishop of Sila
Secretary

65 posted on 07/16/2012 8:27:41 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM
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To: Doe Eyes
If you don't have money or insurance, you should die. Who is willing to pay for the deadbeats?

Lots of people. The same sort who created charity hospitals years ago. Churches, synagogues, the Masonic Lodges, Elks and Moose lodges. But, I suppose you don't know any of these good people.

This is a touchy enough subject that you should use a /sarc tag if that is what you meant.

66 posted on 07/16/2012 8:34:23 PM PDT by slowhandluke (It's hard to be cynical enough in this age.)
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To: Doe Eyes

What’s the matter with you?

That’s one of the most evil things I’ve heard in a long time, and if you feel that way move your butt to China.

They’ll be glad to eliminate you when it’s time for you to die.


67 posted on 07/16/2012 8:38:51 PM PDT by Shadowstrike (Be polite, Be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.)
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp
History will show that ObamaCare is to euthanasia what Roe V Wade was to abortion.

I'm afraid you're right.

68 posted on 07/16/2012 9:03:28 PM PDT by zot
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To: muawiyah

I would like to apply the meat hook approach...let him hang and swing until he dehydrates...he has the face of evil, doesn’t he? Sometimes they just can’t hide it.


69 posted on 07/16/2012 9:09:22 PM PDT by itssme
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp

Give this guy some horns and a pitchfork and red satin cape and hat, and who do ya think he is! I’ve seen his face before in a picture somewhere...sinister.


70 posted on 07/16/2012 9:13:08 PM PDT by itssme
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To: Doe Eyes

This is an article about socialized medicine in Britian. They don’t have insurance like we won’t in the near future under Obamacare because the government will run them out of business.


71 posted on 07/16/2012 10:01:21 PM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” ~Governor Sarah Palin


72 posted on 07/17/2012 12:07:20 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet (You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.)
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp; 185JHP; 230FMJ; AKA Elena; APatientMan; Albion Wilde; Aleighanne; ...
Moral Absolutes Ping!

Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.

FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
[ Add keyword moral absolutes to flag FR articles to this ping list ]


73 posted on 07/17/2012 4:24:19 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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To: Doe Eyes; Dr. Brian Kopp; trisham; DJ MacWoW; little jeremiah; Coleus; narses; Lesforlife; ...
If you don't have money or insurance, you should die. Who is willing to pay for the deadbeats?

So, you SUPPORT death panels?

This article is about the UK, they have socialized medicine, the people have been paying for health care via high taxes for their whole lives.

This is a PRO-LIFE forum, not some libertarian/utilitarian pro-euthanasia cesspool.

74 posted on 07/17/2012 4:49:12 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp
editorial, titled, “Sanctity of life law has gone too far,”

Lord, for the sake of the righteous that remain, please save that island.

75 posted on 07/17/2012 5:09:09 AM PDT by annalex (fear them not)
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To: All

Not sure I should be, but, somewhat surprised to find more than one fine candidate for Obama Death Panel member right here on good old Free Republic.


76 posted on 07/17/2012 5:09:39 AM PDT by John W (Viva Cristo Rey!)
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To: Lady Lucky

Evil.

A thing for the “good” doctor to consider because he doesn’t have a heart or soul, is this: When providing treatment to the most sick the medical profession LEARNS something! Learning from each case adds to the collective knowledge, improves the state of the science. . .medicine is advanced and treatment improved and possibly a cure discovered.

If we had his way, cures and improved treatments would never come about.


77 posted on 07/17/2012 6:54:52 AM PDT by Hulka
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To: Doe Eyes

Do you really believe that all people in the United States actually do not get the medical treatment they need? Are you kidding?

The only ones who don’t are the insane and/or drug addled street people, or those that just don’t ask.

Anyone needing care gets it. No one is turned away at the door. If they are at a private hospital and are stable, they are transferred to the community hospital.


78 posted on 07/17/2012 7:14:50 AM PDT by Hulka
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To: Dr. Brian Kopp

No amount of verbal engineering, of attempts to redefine food and water as “medical treatments” that can arbitrarily be withdrawn, will ever change that reality.

***

So you’re of the opinion that surgically implanting a tube so that a person incapable of the pupillary light reflex — let alone swallowing — can have artificial nutrition pumped directly into their stomachs is not a “medical treatment”?

Kiss goodbye to your credibility on this issue amongst anyone with a lick of common sense.


79 posted on 07/17/2012 7:30:56 AM PDT by gzzimlich
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To: Hulka

Anyone needing care gets it.

***

You’ve obviously never been or met someone with a chronic condition who tried to get treatment at an ER.

This might surprise you, but ER’s are for Emergencies. They’re not set up, equipped or staffed to treat the multitude of chronic conditions that most of us are afflicted with sooner or later as we age.

At best, you get patched up, handed a prescription you can’t afford to fill (or you wouldn’t be using the ER for primary care in the first place) and given the boot.. until the next crisis.

I can’t speak for ‘em all, but I’d bet the vast majority of ER docs and nurses didn’t go into emergency medicine to practice primary care, and they’re tired of having to provide it so people like you can say “Oh, well you can always go to the ER.”

The ER is not the solution to this problem.


80 posted on 07/17/2012 7:37:12 AM PDT by gzzimlich
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