Friday, May 27, 2016

Culture of death update

Mrs Gay Caswell, a metis, has a report from the indigenous areas of Canada on the dangers of being kiled by doctors.

The law pushed by Baby Trudeau is quite broad, and will require doctors nurses etc to cooperate.

Is she paranoid, exagerating, or what?

 A local teacher told us in our living room with other guests that her mother was at St. Brieux Nursing Home but her brother moved her to Watson Nursing Home. At St. Brieux they lifted her with their hands. At Watson they used a hoist. The care was inferior in Watson so she had to have her mother put down.  The care was not as good in Watson as in St. Brieux according to her daughter so the mother was murdered by the approval of her daughter. When did being moved by a piece of nursing home equipment become a justification for capital punishment to the patient?  
     Many times we have heard of patients who had to be removed from one nursing home to a Catholic home because the staff decided it was time to starve the resident. And what will happen if Catholic Nursing Homes will be deprived of medicare funds?

on the other hand, her tirades against poor medical care sound familiar: They are quite similar to those by my Lakota and Objibwe patients when I worked for the IHS in the USA.

As for starving a patient: Alas, that happens too.

But it is subtle.

Terminally ill people don't want fluid, and I once stopped IV's on a woman whose liver and kidneys were in failure, and she was lucid but kept pulling out the IV's. But she could eat and drink, so we just let her live in peace.

And my husband went into a coma and didn't eat for the last three days of his life. Taking him to the hospital would not have prolonged his life, since he had terminal cancer, so we just kept him comfortable here at home.

But starving handicapped and elderly people is de rigor in bioethics: Think the Schiavo case, where she coud respond (She was not in a coma or PVS, she was just severely brain damaged), and parents wanted to take her home to care for her, but her husband had remarried and wanted her dead. So she was made dead.

Nor is this for near comatose handicapped people:

When I worked in Minnesota, one of our patients had frontal lobe damage, which meant she cried when she saw her relative and laughed when she hurt. So she would loudly cry and flail around when watching TV or when she was fed, so we used a feeding tube since feeding her was very difficult, even though she could swallow.

So we had a neurological consult to ask if there was any new treatment for this well known syndrome.

Instead, the doctor spent the 30 minute consultation trying to persuade the family to pull the feeding tube so she would die. Without doing an exam.

The family, who as Objibwe were too polite to contradict the doctor, stayed silent during this time, but on the way out, the nurses' aid, her cousin, who accompanied the patient, told the doctor: That's the difference between you white people and us. We take care of our elders.

We had a similar distrust of "DNR" orders, and often even the terminall ill wouldn't sign them.

A similar distrust can be found in the Black community, who also often don't trust the system and won't sign "living wills".

This is usually written up in the literature as a problem  that needs to be discussed so they will be willing to sign the papers, but the real problem, distrust of the system, is not something talked about.

And if you are naive enough to think this is "compassion"for those in terminal conditions and pain, you are wrong

The slippery slope is alive and well, and since this is being pushed by the powers that be in medicine (read Hastings center and NEJM, since the early 1990's) the idea is that stealth euthanasia, including when the patient's family won't help, is very real

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