Free Republic

In 2013, the American people learned what whoppers the key promises of ObamaCare turned out to be. But the biggest whopper about the Affordable Care Act is yet to be exposed: the tightening grip the federal government will have over your doctor — even if you’re paying with private insurance. Section 1311(h)(1)(B) of the health law gives the secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but patients with private plans they pay for themselves. On Dec. 2, 2013, we learned from the Federal...

London — European and American doctors unveiled a new professional code of conduct on Tuesday, an update of the nearly 2,500-year-old Hippocratic oath which is designed to help doctors meet the needs of patients in the 21st century. The professional charter aims to restore public confidence in the medical profession which has been badly bruised by cases of misconduct, to help doctors cope with ethical problems in the modern world and to re-affirm the profession's commitment to putting the needs of the patient first. Professor George Alberti, president of the Royal College of Physicians in London, described the charter, published ...

Egyptian doctors 'ordered to operate on protesters without anaesthetic' Exclusive: Leaked presidential report recommends an investigation into the highest echelons of the army leadership Senior Egyptian army doctors were ordered to operate without anaesthetic on wounded protesters at a military hospital in Cairo during protests against military rule, according to an investigation commissioned by president Mohamed Morsi. The report into military and police malpractice since 2011 also alleges that doctors, soldiers and medics assaulted protesters inside the hospital. The findings, which relate to the army's behaviour during the Abbassiya clashes in May 2012, are the latest leak to the Guardian...

Doctors across America are sick. A new and desperate plight has surfaced in emergency rooms across the nation for both patients and doctors alike. The following blog by one valiant doctor speaks for thousands of doctors being forced to go against their natural instincts and abilities to allow further hospital care and re-admit patients. Effective October 2012, doctors at hospitals across the land are being forced by the Obama administration to break their Hippocratic Oath. Obama's revamped Medicare has now begun forcing doctors at hospitals to turn their backs on patients no matter how critical their need for re-admittance. Obamacare...

The Doctor Patient Medical Association Foundation conducted a faxed survey of random doctors in May 2012. In the survey, it is clearly delineated that the medical system as it is changing is discouraging doctors from practicing. 83% of the doctors said that current changes made them think about quitting, and 90% of them thought the path of the medical field currently was wrong. They apparently feel that their Hippocratic oaths are being compromised; 61% of them feel that Hippocratic ethics are getting more difficult to practice, which is troubling, since one of the cardinal parts of the oath is the...

“Primum nil nocere.” First, do no harm. This bedrock principle in medicine is a foreign language to most politicians and, sadly, to some Wisconsin doctors, who have violated their oath and the public trust as they have defrauded Wisconsin taxpayers. Several University of Wisconsin family physicians donned their sacred white coats and were caught distributing fraudulent “sick notes” free for the asking quite literally by the boxful - I wonder who paid for that printing - to teachers and others who skipped work to engage in political protest at the state Capitol in Madison. Whatever the merits of the teachers’...

Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn't that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn't work. We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise. Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the...

Hippocratic Out Sarah Carlsruh, October 16, 2009 While he did not equate the current ethics of modern medicine to that of Nazi Germany, at a recent forum, an M.D. did imply that there is an “amoral component” headed in that direction. “One of the first acts of the Nazi government was to legalize voluntary euthanasia,” stated Dr. John Patrick. Reuters reported on September 21st that “assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and physician-assisted suicide—where a doctor prescribes a lethal dose the patient may choose to drink—is legal in the State of Washington, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Oregon.” BBC News reported...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Man gets threatened by Obama thugs for standing up for his handicapped son at Michigan town hall.

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

An op/ed in today's Baltimore Sun has two doctors insisting that physicians refer patients for abortions if they don't wish to do the deed themselves. (The term used is reproductive health, and so it isn't only abortion to which they refer--but it is part of what is meant by the but euphemism.) In complaining about the Bush conscience regulation, that protects health care workers from being discriminated against if they refuse to participate in health procedures they find morally offensive or that is against their religion, the doctors support the must-refer approach. From the column: As health care providers,...

When Your Doctor is a Muslim: Medical Terrorism Comes to America By Debbie Schlussel www.debbieschlussel.com May 17, 2007 Sometimes--so many times--diversity is not what it's cracked up to be. Just ask Joseph Applebaum. Well, you could ask him. But you won't get an answer. He's dead. And he's dead because he was a Jew, and his doctor is a Muslim and grad of "Ayman Al-Zawahiri" Medical School. But Applebaum wasn't denied treatment for being a Jew in Egypt. Or elsewhere in the Muslim world. It happened right here on U.S. soil. In Chicago. As Muslim doctors continue to flood into...

A federal grand jury in Denver has indicted four people on eight counts of arson for a series of eco-terrorism fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. Those indicted are: Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31, and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are presently in federal custody in Oregon, facing separate arson charges. The whereabouts of Overaker and Rubin are unknown. The Two Elks Lodge and other structures on Vail Mountain were burned to the ground on Oct. 19, 1998. Damage was estimated at $12 million. A group called the...

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...

Harm DoneCodifying the decline of the medical profession. In 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients being euthanized in the Netherlands sometimes experienced significant side effects (apart from death, that is), such as nausea, convulsions, or coma. This belied the assertion oft made by euthanasia proponents that being killed by a doctor necessarily provides the euphemistic “gentle landing” of euthanasia lore.  Responding to the Netherlands report, the NEJM published an editorial authored by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the bestselling book How We Die and an internationally prominent physician and bioethicist from Yale University. Nuland, a...

BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak openly endorsed murdering other doctors at an animal-rights convention, we expected some skeptics to give Vlasak the benefit of the doubt. Not any more. A stunning piece of audio surfaced ... Listen to Jerry Vlasak at the "Animal Rights 2003" convention as a PCRM representative. We forgave Doubting Thomases for wondering if our notes were accurate, or if we were perhaps making the whole thing up, even after U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) closed a Judiciary Committee hearing by reading, out loud, a letter from the Center for Consumer Freedom...

Earth Liberation Front claims no leaders or spokespeople When three buildings and four chairlifts on Vail Mountain went up in flames in October, 1998, the Earth Liberation Front, an underground environmental movement, proudly took credit for the arson. The Earth Liberation Front claims to be an underground movement with no leadership, membership or spokespeople... Anyone who commits an act of ecoterrorism or sabotage in the name of the environment is welcome to do it under the front's name... Call yourself an "elf" and you're part of the elite, invisible group. Last month, Chelsea D. Gerlach of Portland Ore. and William...

So, Mr. Chief Justice, will it be us or them? Given his first case, we'll know soon enough if new Chief Justice John Roberts is with us or them. It's a control case, a who's-in-charge case. Us or them. The people of Oregon -- me and you, 'cept they live there and we live here -- have twice affirmed through referenda that if a mentally-with-it dying person wants to skip the last part, it's OK for the doctor to prescribe and the pharmacist to fill a fatal prescription. The Oregon Legislature, being the servant of the people that it is,...