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WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Aug. 14 -- Keeping 84-year-old Samuel Golubchuk alive under court order was "tantamount to torture," and Anand Kumar, M.D., would have no more of it.
Calling the continued care an "abomination," the critical care physician told senior medical officials at Grace Hospital here he would refuse to accept ICU rotations that involved caring for the comatose man.
To follow the court's order, Dr. Kumar wrote in a letter of resignation, "we will likely have to continue to surgically hack away at his infected flesh at the bedside in order to keep infection at bay."
"This is grotesque," he continued. "To inflict this kind of assault on him without a reasonable hope of benefit is an abomination."
~Snip~
But the rules vary from place to place. "Patchwork is the best way to describe it," Dr. Curtis said.
"There is no fundamental rule or law about how these cases are handled," Dr. Curtis said, and there's not even a consensus within the medical community.
The American Medical Association, for instance, enjoins its members to respect patient autonomy and to make "reasonable efforts" to figure out what a patient would have wanted, including consulting family members or other patient surrogates, asking ethics committees, or even going to court.
But the AMA doesn't come down on one side or the other on the issue of who makes the decision. "What most guidelines lack," said Dr. Blackmer, "is that final step -- to say, at the end of the day, when you can't come to an agreement, here's how to make the decision."
One exception to that, Dr. Curtis said, is Texas, where a state law sets out a process that governs withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment even in the face of opposition from surrogate decision-makers.
Under the Texas Advance Directives Act, a doctor can refuse to continue "inappropriate" life-support. The issue is then referred to an ethics committee and if the committee agrees with the doctor, the patient's surrogate has 10 days to either accept the ruling or find another facility that will continue the life-support.
The only role for the courts, the law says, is to extend the time limit if there's evidence that a transfer is in the works.......................
Special Report: Court-Ordered End-of-Life Care for Comatose Man Deemed Torture
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This is just a distraction, developed by the neo-conservatives and their talk show hosts during the Clinton administration. This is when they discovered just how juvenile and easily distracted the people of this great nation truly are. So much so that we would ignore the overthrow of our government while we applied all of our attentions to mindless, meaningless drivel such as sexual scandal, O.J. Simpson, Terry Schiavo, Elian Gonzalez, (just the fact that you recognize these names is testament to the success of the American propaganda machine) not to mention the "issues"; gays, abortion, immigration, all which, individually, are important to some, but as a whole are just more distractions from the things that truly matter. Like the fact that we have been taken over by a dictator who represents the richest of the rich, the military-industrial complex whose aim it is to destroy the middle class, replace their overpaid labor with third world immigrants from Mexico and China, who will work for dollars a day. Or the fact that we went to war in a country based on lies and forged documents from the CIA, under the direction of the Bush administration for no other reason than to manipulate the oil market in the favor of Bush and his bosses. Or that the most devastating act of terrorism in history took place on our shores, one year into Bush's presidency, which shows every indication of inside assistance and complicity in the way the buildings were destroyed and which buildings were destroyed. All of this and people eating live bugs and smearing themselves with hyena excrement or prostituting their ex-marital partners, or their parents for money on "Reality Television," anything which makes us say, forget the president's speech, "Who Wants To Ball My Trans-Sexual Sister" is coming on in five minutes..........................
It's Distractions That Are Destroying Us And We're Allowing It!
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