Judge refuses mother's plea to treat terminally-ill son (Where Obamacare will end)

Having been at this point with my parents, who were not as bad as this young man. They made the decision to do Hospice, when they were diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Watching them slowly die was torture, but it would have been worse if they chose the few extra months Chemo would have bought them.

I just had my beloved Freedom’s Rocket a mini poodle of 13 yrs I’d had since he was 3 months old in for what the Vet thought was a kidney stone. She found wide spread cancer. She wanted to know If I wanted to wake him to say goodbye.

I thought that was cruel, and told her just to love on him a little and let him drift off to the Rainbow. They made me a clay imprint of his footprint. It was painful to make the decision, but it was for the best.

This is not a Terry Shivo Case.

This is where things ill logically end up here. Call it a preview of coming attractions.

In all fairness, doctors have been doing this longer than any of us have lived. It happens at a point when doctors admit to themselves that they are powerless to stop the inevitable. Family members and especially parents may want extraordinary measures to be taken, but it is truly malpractice to carry out surgery or prescribe treatment that is painful, dehumanizing and meaningless.

I agree this is not really something new and in this case probably has little or nothing to do with socialized government healthcare. He has been getting treatments since he was 1 years old when first diagnosed with a brain tumor and has lived much longer than anyone expected.

Unfortunately there comes a time in some cases where the doctors have to be honest if not brutally frank about their family member’s condition and explain to them that further treatment are not only “futile” but unnecessarily painful and may in some cases actually hasten death. Chemo, while a life saving treatment for many, is very hard on the body.

Giving chemo to a very late stage brain cancer patient whose cancer has spread beyond the brain and spread to who knows how many of his other organs, whose condition has rapidly deteriorated and who is in and out of a coma now, (according to the article), is not only futile but sadly unrealistic and realistically will do nothing to improve his chances of survival at this point. Chemo is not some sort of “miracle pill”. It is very taxing on the body and only works under certain conditions and is often ineffective in these late stage cases were the cancer has metastized to multiple organ systems and the patient is deemed too weak to endure further chemo treatments or for further neurosurgical intervention i.e. invasive brain surgery.

The woman had told the judge: “I don’t want to hear you say he has to die. I don’t want to be part of that. I’m afraid I can’t.” “He is a sick child but he is coping. (He) is not dying.” “Give him a chance. Maybe chemo will work. If (he) goes he goes. But he may not. He may have months to live,” she said. She added: “We may be lucky and he will live a few months or a miracle will happen. You just have to believe he will pull through.”

My heart aches and absolutely goes out to this mother and father. I fully understand and empathize that they don’t want their son to die, that they love him very much and that they want to give him every chance, but it also sounds to me, a case where the parents, after bravely and stalwartly having fought this terrible illness for so many years, are in a state of denial, that despite their and his doctor’s best efforts, their son’s resilience, that cancer is winning and will very soon win and they just can’t accept that inevitable outcome.

I also feel for the doctors. It is not a situation, like say when you take your 25 old Chevy to the auto mechanic and the mechanic tells you the transmission is shot and not worth replacing because the engine and suspension are also shot and you tell the mechanic, “I don’t care, replace it anyway” and the mechanic says, “OK. It’s your money”. These doctors are treating a human being, not a machine.

Yes, parents and family should have a lot of input on medical treatments and the continuation of treatment and care and we must as a society be very vigilant to protect people from not getting life saving treatments due solely to costs and or cost benefit outcome metrics, but we also need to understand that doctors also have taken a sacred oath to “do no harm”.

From the article: “All clinicians involved in his care had concluded that further chemotherapy and neurosurgical intervention was futile and not in his best interests, the judge was told.”

This could be, sounds to me like this may be a case were the doctors don’t want to do more any more harm to him by pumping this young man with more chemo drugs that not only won’t do any good at this point but may cause him unnecessary pain and suffering or perform further brain surgeries when the cancer has spread beyond the brain, interventions that at this point that may even hasten his death.

Sometimes withholding further invasive and or painful treatments when it is medically futile and providing palliative care that allows the dying person to die with some measure of dignity and relatively pain free and have a quality of life for their remaining days or weeks, months, one that allows them to be conscious enough to say their good byes, is the compassionate and also the medically and ethically correct and yes IMO, is sometimes the morally correct thing to do.

In some ways our advances in medical care, in our ability to save many lives and prolong life has become both a blessing and a curse.

Some people IMO have a very unrealistic view of what modern medicine can do and don’t understand what it can’t do. I understand that this young man’s parents what to give him a few more weeks or months of life because they are hoping for a “miracle”. But if he is to be saved from death by a “Divine Miracle” that would happen if it was “Divinely Ordained” to happen, regardless of what the doctors do or don’t do. Right?

It is not fair IMO to the doctors treating him to have them be forced to provide further and completely futile and invasive and potentially painful care to a late stage dying person just because the family is hoping for a “miracle”. It puts the doctors into the position of playing God. But if the treatments fail, it is not God who will be blamed, but the all too very human doctors. They will be blamed for either doing too much or for doing too little.

Thank you for such a wonderful and compassionate post.

You got it backwards. War and government enforcement is an extension of lust politics when they fail. Doctors do not sue people like that.

... And so because one day you were drunk and lusty means you have to be divested by government of your choices? Well go ahead, join the Army, don’t force others