all that stuff the AMA and other PC types about teaching racism to medical student so they are not racist misses the point: The danger is not dislike of a person's skin colour, but it is a cultural thing: a dislike of cultures that sees the sick and handicapped as part of their family responsibility, in contrast to the cost effectiveness/ efficiency of western medicine, where the culture stresses independence and a pleasant life as the goal of life.
Compare and contrast to Buddhism, where life is suffering, or of Catholicism, where we identify our suffering with that of Jesus, or of my Native American patients, who face suffering with bravery and see it as the path they are supposed to tread.
But the dirty little secret is that assisted suicide is being pushed as a right, ignoring that the dark side of this is that it is efficient: No caregiver has to give up their job, no expensive nursing home charges, and hey fewer old folks mean less money doled out on social security.
This cost effective western way of seeing things, combined with a culture by doctors that has little insight that some cultures have different priorities than success and happiness for the individual, is the real background to an ingrained racism in western medicine.
Let Anita Cameron explain: italics mine.
As access to healthcare, services and supports are being stripped from disabled people around the country,
(in the name of cost effective medical care of course)
we cannot continue to push forward with assisted suicide laws.
Cuts to funding for home care services, as well as reduction or elimination of eligibility to those services, combined with racial and disability disparities and discrimination in healthcare, will lead to those being deemed to be terminal to feel that they have no choice but to ask for assisted suicide.
Lack of access to home care givers due to workforce shortages, with workers unable to work enough hours and earn a livable wage, will further compound this.
As a disabled Black person, I am alarmed at the negative impact that the normalization of assisted suicide will have on Black disabled, in particular, because contrary to what assisted suicide proponents say, assisted suicide is all about disability.
... According to the Oregon data (Oregon was the first state to enact an assisted suicide law), the top five reasons people request assisted suicide are: loss of autonomy, decreasing ability to participate in enjoyable activities, loss of dignity, feelings of being an emotional or financial burden on family and loved ones, and loss of control of bodily functions, such as incontinence and vomiting.
These are all disability related reasons that can be addressed with services and supports, not assisted suicide.
yes, but they cost money. For example, 53 million Americans are full or part time caregivers, many of whom cut back work hours or quit work to care for their family members. An alternative approach is nursing homes or home care, but these too cost money. But a dead person doesn't cost a lot.
The culture of caring is more common in the non elites, who see this as part of life. So how do you convince them to agree to die or let their loved ones be eliminated?
Yes, lots of money out there trying to do this.
We Blacks are overwhelmingly against assisted suicide, but there’s an organization called Compassion and Choices that’s going into Black communities trying to convince us that assisted suicide is a good thing and that it’s a right.
funding sources here. Your stock market investments at work.
That’s how they bamboozle us by couching it in those terms, because we know what it feels like not to have basic human and civil rights.
Compassion and Choices, once known as The Hemlock Society, is an organization formed and led by middle and upper middle class whites. This demographic of white people overwhelmingly support assisted suicide.
this is why I point out it is not racism per se, but a culture war: efficiency and power over true compassion and family.
Compassion and Choices hires middle class Black staff to come into our communities to spread the lie about assisted suicide because they know that we’re more likely to listen if information comes from someone who looks like us. As a result, some middle class and wealthy Blacks are falling for this farce.
As assisted suicide becomes normalized, racial disparities in healthcare will mean that Black patients will be more likely to be written off as terminal and steered towards ending our lives.
check out Dr. C's video below
Being disabled compounds this. Disabled people also experience health disparities because doctors quite literally devalue our lives, don’t want us as patients and don’t believe that we are treated unfairly.
Add being Black to that, and the risks of being written off as terminal in a state where assisted suicide is legal, rises exponentially.
In the face of rampant healthcare inequities, it’s no surprise that assisted suicide is rarely used by the Black community. We fight to live. We fight to get access to treatment. We fight for end of life treatment. We fight for medical care that most white folks take for granted. Black people, wake up
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this is not limited to the black community.When I worked for the IHS we once sent a lady with frontal lobe syndrome (alert but partially paralyzed, with paradoxical crying when she was happy, something that disturbed the other patients. She also needed a feeding tube)
Instead, the neurologist without examining the lady except for a short glance, took the entire hour to pressure the family into removing the feeding tube. The family, who were Native Americans, kept quiet and did not respond (this was a cultural response to not saying no). But a cousin, a nurse, who was more westernized, at the end of the meeting turned to the doctor and said they wouldn't kill their relative, because Indians, unlike you white folk, don't kill our elders.
Indeed, their handicap was seen as another path that the Great Spirit gave them to walk, and often our patients in the nursing home were considered as being on the other side, i.e. able to see spirits and intercede for us.
and as assisted suicide is seen as the treatment for the sick and handicapped, the next step of course is for medical personnel to help them along, since the medical profession now sees death as a good outcome for people who are vulnerable. In the USA this is racist of course, but the mindset is already there in the UK, where N.I.C.E. guidelines stress keeping treatment cheap.
oh, the docs etc. won't push an overdose on you and voila you are dead. They will do it indirectly, mimicking the treatment we use for truly terminal patients who need lots of sedation/pain medicine to control symptoms.
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