Free Republic

BOSTON (Reuters) - About two-thirds of cardiac arrest patients taken to hospitals by emergency medical technicians die anyway, and probably most could be declared dead at the scene, according to research published on Wednesday. The report in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that certain emergency medical services -- not those staffed by paramedics -- could ease the distress of loved ones and dramatically reduce the number of hopeless but expensive hospital trips. The assessment of 1,240 cardiac arrest rescue runs over two years in Ontario, Canada, found that only 1 in 500 people survived to be discharged from...

DALLAS A mother fighting to keep her baby on life support, despite a hospital's determination that her efforts would be futile, will get two more weeks to find a facility that will take the 10-month-old. A judge had been set to decide tomorrow whether to grant a temporary injunction to stop Children's Medical Center in Dallas from removing Daniel Wayne Cullen the Second from life support. But attorneys for the boy's mother and the hospital agreed yesterday to extend a temporary restraining order for another two weeks. Attorney Brian Potts, who represents the boy's mother, Dixie Belcher, said he plans...

Odd political bedfellows working together to change law that allows doctors to withdraw treatment, transfer patients Monday, May 08, 2006 Some unlikely political bedfellows want to change the state's "medical futility" law, saying it gives doctors too much power to make life-and-death decisions and families who disagree too little time to fight back. The law has received renewed attention in recent days after doctors in Austin and Houston sought to withdraw treatment from patients whose families wanted to keep them on life support. A collection of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, Texas Right to Life members and disability rights...

On June 13th, I will have been a physician for twenty five years. Twenty four of those years, exactly one half of my life, will have been spent as a neurologist. I would like, therefore, to state for the record, how grateful I am to have been allowed to practice as a neurologist, during this, the profession’s best of times.When I first began my neurology residency 24 years ago, the practice of neurology was described to me in the phrase “diagnose and adios”. Neurologists were great at diagnosing, based on history and physical examination, where precisely a lesion in the...

A woman television presenter who was critically injured in the Potters Bar train crash has made a miraculous recovery - nearly two years after doctors declared her brain-dead and said that she should be allowed to die. Relatives of Tanya Liu, a 34-year-old Taiwanese-born newsreader, say they were told by British doctors that she was in a persistent vegetative state after the crash in May 2002, which killed two of her friends and five other people, and left 76 injured. Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in north London said that Ms Liu's injuries were so horrific that there was...

This is not the column I was going to write. However, it the column I must write.A young woman named Terri Schiavo [www.terrisfight.org] is on a deathwatch through court-ordered starvation and dehydration. Her death comes courtesy of the efforts of her husband, Michael Schiavo; right-to-die activists like lawyer George Felos and Dr. Ronald Cranford; judges George Greer and Richard Lazzara; and the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, which have refused to hear the case. Terri's parents want her to live, and after viewing the videos and talking to people, so do I. Up-to-date information is at www.terrisfight.org....

Mortal differences divide hospital and patient's family By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003 During her first year as a hospital patient, Barbara Howe "talked" with doctors, nurses, and her three daughters by pointing to letters on an alphabet board. Later, when she could no longer move, she blinked her eyes to answer questions. Now, Howe, 78, is what doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital call "locked in," a person trapped inside a body that can't breathe on its own, eat, or even say when something hurts. Howe seems able to make only one tiny movement: opening her left eye wide. But...

Increasingly across America, the sick and elderly, some with terminal illnesses, are being murdered simply by withholding food and water. When a new edition of his book "Forced Exit, The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder" was published, author Wesley J. Smith couldn’t have known that America was so far down that slope that Florida courts were ordering the killing, in a most barbaric way, of a disabled but conscious woman. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an attorney and consultant for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, wrote the first version...