Italian doctors are making it clear that they understand that a doctor's role is to help people not kill them.
Thread by me.
ROME, January 13, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An open letter by doctors, circulated before Christmas, asking that Eluana Englaro be spared death by dehydration has grown from 44 to over 700 signatures. The letter says that physicians have a “professional and scientific duty” to provide hydration and nutrition to a patient who is not capable of feeding himself.
The case of Eluana Englaro, the young woman in a state of diminished consciousness whose father has campaigned in the courts to have her food and hydration removed, continues to make headlines in Italy. In November, the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeals court in Rome ruled that Eluana could be dehydrated to death.
The open letter, however, states that if the decree of the Court of Cassation allowing the killing of Eluana is applied that will be an attack against the “basic rules of good medical practice as established in the declaration of Helsinki.”
Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, carried comments today from Luigi Tesio, a signatory of the letter and professor of physical therapy at the university of Milan, underlining that the duty of the medical doctor is to “take care of handicapped patients and not to let them die.”
. . .