Let Lauren Live!

Just when we thought we were getting somewhere... I wonder if such experts in killing, like Judge George Greer, will be visiting professors at that place...

From end-of-life issues displayed in the Terri Schiavo case to the use of experimental drugs argued in Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, judges at the medical school also learned that bioethics issues, often involving a range of multidisciplinary expertise, continue to raise legal questions that can end up on court dockets. Yet not all judges were aware that they could draw on bioethics experts or members of a hospital ethics committee to testify in the midst of such disputes.

"Judges need to know that bioethics is a rigorous field of scholarship, which, where relevant, should be of some value to them in their deliberations," said Eric M. Meslin, PhD, director of IU's Center for Bioethics in Indianapolis and an instructor at the judges' school.....

Med school for judges: A crash course in medical litigation... Black robes mingle with white coats to learn about medical science and how to apply it to complex court cases.

8mm

The slippery slope in the UK is starting to sound more like a luge track. Thread by wagglebee.

ONE in three doctors believes the law should be changed to allow euthanasia for the terminally ill.

A snapshot survey of doctors has found 35% in favour of assisted suicide compared to 60% against the controversial move. The remainder said they were unsure. The survey was carried out by Doctors.net.uk, an online discussion forum and professional network for medics which represents 95% of doctors in the UK.

Medics were asked: "In your opinion should legislation be changed to allow euthanasia?" A total of 58 said no, 34 said yes and five said they did not know......

One in three medics back mercy killing (U.K.)

8mm

The PP peeps are smug about so far getting away with defying God's laws and then catch themselves in the trap of the law of unintended consequences. Haw!

Thread by wagglebee.

..........................

Security guards block Truth Truck from leaving parking lot, help abortion-bound women see the horrific truth about abortion

Contact: Troy Newman, President, 316-841-1700; Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Policy Advisor, 316-516-3034; both with Operation Rescue, info@operationrescue.org

ST. LOUIS, MO., July 20 /Christian Newswire/ -- Operation Rescue's Truth Truck, driven by Mark Gietzen, caused a stir the St. Louis Planned Parenthood abortion mill on Saturday, July 19, 2008, when he drove onto their parking lot and parked near the front door as abortion-bound women entered the facility.

Security guards for Planned Parenthood immediately rushed to close the parking lot's iron gates to prevent the Truth Truck from leaving while they summoned the police. But this action turned out for the good, allowing the Truth Truck to witness to the women in the parking lot for longer than it would have otherwise..............

(Operation Rescue) Truth Truck 'Held Hostage' at St. Louis Planned Parenthood

8mm

TERRI SCHINDLER SCHIAVO WAS MURDERED:

www.judgegeorgegreer.com (maniac in a black robe) who has the Hulk Hogan divorce now only in Amerika and for a twist, there is a young Marine missing half his frontal lobe who survived Iraq but is on life support from a bad MVA on Court Street which leads to Greer's courthouse in downtown Clearwater. Hogan's kid's car hit a palm tree. John Graziano wasn't wearing a seat belt and is really in bad shape but nobody's trying to kill him.

There are disparities and discrimination in who lives and who dies. Graziano who is in much worse condition than Terri should live and Terri also definitely should still be alive. She was murdered.

Never forget it was Republican judges, republicans in the Fla legislature, those famous GOP brothers and Gov. Crist, not christ who helped murder Terri.

This is why my voter i.d. now says: NO PARTY AFFILIATION (NPA).

Helen Keller would have been so dead if she had lived in Pinellas County, Florida. In other words, anybody who cannot utter but a few words can and ought to be starved and dehydrated to death. If you don’t agree w/that standard, stay away from Pinellas Park where they kill people every day because there’s no oversight. It’s carte blanche since Terri was murdered. (bad hospices kill people).

QUESTION. Why don't the guardians who have the power of life and death by default HAVE TO BE EVALUATED FOR MENTAL DEFICITS OR IDEATIONS? The guardians are sick, not the disabled individual.

The standards for guardians is very low. They can even be subhuman.

QUESTION. Why don't the guardians who have the power of life and death by default HAVE TO BE EVALUATED FOR MENTAL DEFICITS OR IDEATIONS? The guardians are sick, not the disabled individual.

The standards for guardians is very low. They can even be subhuman.

And those who could have saved her, such as Jeb Bush, refused to act.

I got this from my automatic e-mail from Laura Ingraham:

“A MIRACLE BORN FROM TRAGEDY: We were fortunate to be joined today by Gary McCaleb, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, and Jesse Ramirez, a Gulf War veteran whom doctors claimed was in a permanent vegetative state (á la Terri Schiavo) following a horrific auto accident in 2007 -snip-.

Just 10 days after the accident, doctors followed through on Jesse’s (now) ex-wife’s order to remove his feeding tube. For five days Jesse was deprived of food and water until his sister, Marlene, contacted the ADF for help.

Thanks to the efforts of the ADF and his family, Jesse walked out of the hospital months later under his own power, and today he’s a walking, talking testimony to the inherent value of every human life. Last month, Arizona enacted Jesse’s Law, which protects people in similar circumstances.”

Maybe they could help Lauren, or some others. Here’s their link:

http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/

This morning, I am posting a series of topics from the Medical Futility blog of Professor Thaddeus Pope...

Thanks, Leslie.

....................................

Minneapolis oncologist Stuart Bloom has a short piece in the July 1, 2008 Journal of Clinical Oncology titled "In Defense of Futile Gestures."

He describes a patient for whom, after her fourth try at remission, he recommended "supportive care alone." While the patient initially agreed with this plan, she later decided that she wanted to "fight her cancer" even though "the chance of any intervention was vanishingly low."

Bloom agrees that "continuing toxic therapy in hope of some response is inadequate medicine." But he also concedes that "our prognostic acumen is often insufficient to predict which patient will defy statistical odds and improve." His patient, of course, ended up being that rare patient who improved dramatically.

It is important to remember the limits of prognostication. In several studies (e.g. Smith et al., Critical Care Med. May 2007) of the Texas Advance Directives Act, some patients made substantial recoveries even after the treating team, the ethics committee, and potential transferee facilities all judged that further treatment was medically inappropriate.

Posted by Thaddeus Mason Pope at 9:12 AM

Defending Futile Treatment

8mm

2 comments:

Makarios said...: A useful background document might be the guidance on "Withholding or Withdrawing Life Sustaining Treatment in Children: A Framework for Practice," issued by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The pdf can be downloaded at http://www.rcpch.ac.uk/Publications/Publications-list-by-title (scroll down the alpha list to "W").

This publication canvasses, among other things, the situations where it may be ethical and legal to consider withholding or withdrawal of lifesustaining medical treatment, the legal framework, and the decision-making process.; July 18, 2008 5:28 AM
Thaddeus Mason Pope said...: Thanks.; July 18, 2008 9:46 PM

New "Right to Life" Case: Amber Hartland

8mm

One of the coveted arguments of the death crews is that people get too old and it is a waste to try to help them. Well this dashes it!

.............................

"When Hazel Homer was 99, more than one doctor advised that there was little to be done about her failing heart except wait for it to fail a final time. But Mrs. Homer was not interested in waiting to die of what many would call old age." So, reports the NY Times, a month before her 100th birthday, Hazel had surgery to implant a specialized pacemaker and defibrillator.

CON: Hazel's surgeon was reluctant to perform the operation at first. “You get a lot of criticism for doing this sort of thing,” he said. “People say it’s not cost-effective, she’s going to die anyway. That’s a fact you deal with in every patient, but particularly in the elderly.” Indeed, many say that "such aggressive treatment for what are euphemistically known as the late elderly can be wasteful and barbaric, warning that the rush to test the limits of technology can give patients false hope and compound their health challenges with surgical complications."

PRO: On the other hand, "[w]ith such rapid growth of centenarians, debate has mounted over how far to go — not to mention how much Medicare money to spend — in providing major medical services to extend already very long lives." Hazel, after all, is now 104.

Medical Efforts to Treat the Very Old

8mm

And this...

..........................................

The NY Times and Star-Tribune report on an Abigail Alliance-type lawsuit brought this week on contractual, rather than constitutional, grounds.

Jacob Gunvalson, 16, suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic, degenerative disease that mostly affects young boys. Typically, those who suffer from it die in their 20s because of weakness in their heart and lung muscles. There is no known cure, but the Gunvalson family believes an experimental drug being developed by PTC Therapeutics holds out hope.

Jacob was dissuaded from entering an earlier trial. Now, because he can no longer walk, he is ineligible for the current trial. On Wednesday, the Gunvalsons sued PTC in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, claiming that it had repeatedly assured them that Jacob would have access to the drug, known as PTC124. PTC denied ever making that assurance. The Gunvalsons are represented, pro bono, by former Minnesota AG Mike Hatch.

Posted by Thaddeus Mason Pope at 7:34 AM

Suing for Experimental Lifesaving Drugs

8mm

What is it worth? More from Professor Pope...

........................................

Julie Salamon, has a great guest post at the NYT Freakonomics blog on the cost/benefit dilemma of end-of-life medical care. It nicely sets up the essential value conflict at the heart of medical futility disputes.

Robert Cohen, a New York City internist involved in public health issues,
told me he wished Teddy Kennedy had issued this statement instead of opting for
surgery:
“Because I am not a young man, the cancer in my brain will progress
rapidly and is likely to incapacitate me in the near future. I trust that my
doctors will do everything they can to prevent further seizures and to keep me
in comfort. I will not endure extraordinary excess pain and suffering, while
hundreds of thousand of dollars will not be spent on surgical debulking,
radiation, and chemotherapeutic regimens which do not work. Modern medicine
cannot cure my cancer, but it can keep me comfortable and free of pain. I have
already contacted the Massachusetts General Hospital Hospice program.”
Dr. Cohen added, “I’m not suggesting that Kennedy has an obligation to choose
hospice rather than therapy, but I do think it would be very reasonable for him
not to adopt the false ’struggle against cancer’ model.”
Dr. Michael Salcman, former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. . . had a different view:
“It is true that we spend most of our health care dollars in the last 6 months of life, but who or what is to tell a relatively intact, feisty, willing-to-fight, rich person that he is supposed to simply go into hospice in a free capitalist country like ours.”

Posted by Thaddeus Mason Pope at 2:14 PM

What Cost/Benefit Analysis to Apply to the End of Life

8mm

What is in a name? Schiavo, we know, means slave in Italian. Some names are picked up to reflect how the users really perceive things. So, sorry, Mikey, you may be a clymer but you have been borked. No lewinsky for you. As a verb in infinitive, to "schiavo" takes on a meaning more than you do, Mikey...

........................................

If one-quarter of the Massachusetts residents who claim wet palates for Native Tongue linguistics show up at Rock the Bells this Saturday at the Comcast Center, then the number of hand-me-down Scandinavian autos in the parking lot may break the record set at every Phish show ever. That doesn’t bother Q-Tip, though; if he had a problem sharing fans with Dave Matthews, Cake, and Billy Joel, then he would have Schiavo’d the group eons ago instead of rescuing it like Baby Jessica every few years for a reunion tour. “I’m honored that those people [who don’t otherwise like hip-hop] listen to me,” Tip says. “Hopefully they’ve dug what I’ve done enough to open the doors for other hip-hop out there, whether it’s Large Professor, Biggie, LL or N.W.A.”

Here we go, yo

8mm

Devine observations...

Thread by wagglebee

GLASGOW, Scotland, July 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The work of the Church to protect the unborn, to assist "frightened young" pregnant women and to help to "secure a better standard of living and greater opportunities for the poor," far from being mutually exclusive, are closely interrelated works that cannot be separated from each other, according to the Catholic bishop of Motherwell.

Joseph Devine, the fourth bishop of the diocese that encompasses parts of Glasgow in Scotland, said, "Indeed, a nation that condemns to abortion our beautiful and blameless unborn babies betrays itself as morally, ethically and politically untrustworthy and disinclined to give due care and attention to the poorest and weakest members of our society."....

A Nation that Condemns Unborn is "Ethically and Politically Untrustworthy": Scottish Catholic Bishop

8mm

She is not playing God, just a lesser murderous demon.

Thread by wagglebee.

Judge Kim Browne, of Franklin County, admitted to the Columbus Dispatch newspaper that she has never denied a teen's request for a secret abortion.

"I don't think I'm playing God at all," she told the newspaper. "That is their choice. That's the decision they are going to have to live with."...

Ohio Judge Admits She's Never Denied Teens' Abortion Bypass Request

8mm

I know of more than one case where doctors have given no hope for recovery. Yet the patients recovered.

And I guess when it does happen they hope nobody will notice in the media.

In our own case, doctors gave no longer than six months to our son from the day he was born, and for twenty six years, they constantly predicted he would not make it the next six months.