Absolutely gut wrenching. This is where things ill logically end up here. Call it a preview of coming attractions.
Prayers for this family.
Note: I'm new here (long time lurker) and my posts and comments are moderated. So please bear with me if replies to comments don't appear quickly.
Off the judge. He has outlived his usefulness .
A few judicial decisions, and then nothing but individual bureaucratic decisions.
Some animals are more equal than others.
So death is in the teenager's best interest?
And they talked up the NHS as an example of what CommieCare would be!!!!
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.
A good example is a surgeon who cuts into a patient only to find that they have advanced, metastatic cancer. So they discontinue the surgery and close the wound. If a doctor is a person of faith, they would typically say that the patient “is in God’s hands, now.”
The real anguish happens when we try to cling to life when it is time to die, for others or ourselves. Life is not ours to give or take away, nor to cling to when it is over.
Welcome Aboard!
Judge Hogg. It sounds like it’s straight out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged with names like Wesley Mooch.
Death panels. Coming soon to an Obamanation near you,
Judge J. Hogg,sounds like a character from “Dukea of Hazrd”.
Welcome aboard.
I don’t agree with the parents’ choices, but I am ever more against the decision being taken away from them by government.
Can we sue the judge for malpractice?
Clearly the government owns your care now.
This just illustrates/proves the real downside of giving one human, no matter at what level of government, the power over another person. The US judicial system is loaded/contaminated with such ‘judges’. Society then moves by individuals not by accepted societal rules/laws. I have lived many years through many wars and seen such evil by people.
the rationing board in the UK is named “NICE”...talk about Orwellian language.
And they decide if you live or die: if you don’t meet the criteria, you die.
One notorious case was the Lockerbie bomber, in a Scottish prison, who was denied chemotherapy (and if you read between the lines it was because his age meant he didn’t meet the criteria). Ghadaffy had a fit and got him sent home to Libya, and guess what: The guy lived for two years on treatment.
It caused a bit of a scandal when he didn’t die on time, and lots of critics claimed he wasn’t at death’s door and shouldn’t have been released.
The fact he was terminal because they refused to treat him was carefully ignored in the press...
this is govt healthcare.
when the govt takes over healthcare, it has to pay the bills. it will then look to cut expenses whenever possible. elderly and dying patients are just liabilities to be removed as soon as possible
this is not conjecture or speculation.
this is historical fact.
Without socialized medicine, there are eventually practical limits to the care that can be provided to a patient. The limit is financial, perhaps emotional.
With socialized medicine, there is the misconception that “everybody gets everything” and it’s “free” so there is no mechanism through which expectations for care are limited in the individual case.
Obviously somebody gave the family some reason to hope one more round of chemo could have some benefit.
Socialized medicine will ALWAYS end up limiting care. Politically connected will get the best care. Everyone else gets what is left.
This is an extreme that SHOULD be pointed out as part of the abomination of socialized medicine - because government is deciding where care ends instead of the individual or family.
If the family were actually paying for the care, chances are this would have ended long before this - but you never know - it would be up to the family to decide. That’s important.
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.