Posted on 11/01/2006 4:38:55 PM PST by Piefloater
IN a controversial treatment, doctors in the US have given a severely disabled child drugs to keep her small and 'manageable' for her parents.
In a report published in a medical journal this month, the doctors described a six-year-old girl with profound, irreversible developmental disability who was given high doses of estrogen to permanently halt her growth so that her parents could continue to care for her at home.
The controversial growth-attenuation treatment, which included hysterectomy, was requested by the child's parents and initiated after careful consultation and review by an ethics committee.
In their report in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, doctors Daniel F. Gunther and Douglas S. Diekema, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, explained the reasoning behind what they hoped would generate healthy debate.
Dr Gunther is at the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology, and Dr Diekema is at the Centre for Pediatric Bioethics.
Caring for children with profound developmental disabilities could be difficult and demanding, they said.
For children with severe combined neurologic and cognitive impairment who are unable to move without assistance, all the necessities of life – dressing, bathing, transporting – must be provided by caregivers, usually parents, and these tasks become increasing difficult, if not impossible, as the child increases in size.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
Then why wouldn't you do it to a child with 'normal' intelligence?
-A8
If the child is so terribly disabled that they will never be able to function or take care of themselves, then I've got no problem leaving such treatment options up to the parents. The hysterectomy, in particular, sounds merely sensible.
-A8
Because (1) in the case of no particular physical disablities, it is not necessary to do it in order to enhance the life of a child with normal intelligence. (2) In the case of a child with normal intelligence but even severe physical limitations, that child has capacities that the child in this article will never have: the capacity to give consent or withhold it, the capacity to think for him/herself, to form mature relationships.
In a child with normal intelligence, making this choice on their behalf would deny their capacity to make choices for themselves.
This child will never have the capacity to make choices or exercise free will. Therefore, the decision should rightfully be made by the parents as to the best path to take to make that child's life as comfortable and love-filled as possible. So they did.
So how does that making whacking off the limbs of mentally retarded people ethical?????
Did I say it was ethical?
I said it was useful. In addition it is understandable given the difficulties of managemnt of profoundly mentally retarded. And I certaily was not talking about Islamic "hacking " Those terms are your agenda.
More euphemisms. What disease, exactly, is this procedure treating? None. The procedure is in fact disabling what *is* functioning, not treating what is not functioning.
-A8
From the sound of this, the child will not know that she is physically altered in any way. My neighbors have a boy who is profoundly mentally disabled and the kid is getting too big for the sling type stroller that they use to get him around. Both parents are at least six feet tall and I don't know how big ( I say big instead of tall because the boy does not stand)the boy will grow, he's only eleven years old.
This is a fanciful question, as it's impossible to determine one's lifetime mental capacity in utero, and also the simple fact of not having arms and legs would not reduce weight to the extent that a drug keeping someone very small would (actually, come to think of it, there could be a weight situation even with the estrogen).
But, no, I wouldn't approve thalidomide just like I wouldn't approve amputation. The existence of limbs serves to give any person who has use of those limbs more ability to move, to shift oneself if uncomfortable, to respond to painful stimuli by rolling away without the substantial difficulty that an even mentally normal person has in movement without any limbs. I didn't see if this child can creep, crawl, or roll around like an infant. All of those things can benefit an individual, so no, I wouldn't choose thalidomide because I think it has potential for harm in a way stunting growth does not.
Tell me, A8, what do you see is the actual harm in stunting this child's growth?
Here's what you said: (in #70)
If a human adult is little more than vegative and infantile, you can take off both armes and legs as far as I am concerned.
If you weren't there saying that you thought it was ethically permissible to take off her arms and legs, then perhaps you should be more careful to make sure you say just what you mean.
-A8
Were you that child, you would not know the difference between weighing 50 pounds or 200 pounds, but her loving parents who have committed their life to caring for her sure do. Think about having to lift your 20 year old 200 pound kid into and out of the car, or a chair or the bathtub. Could you do it? Few can and when it reaches that point, parents have to turn it over to the "professionals."
Unless you have walked in the shoes of parents who have taken care of severely damaged children, don't be so quick to judge. I have a 13 year old niece who has more physical problems than we could list here and the mental ability of a 6 month old. But God has blessed her with the world's greatest parents who will love and keep her as long as possible. If something like this could extend the time they keep her vs an institutional life, I am for it. Sadly, this particular child will probably not live much longer --- at birth they gave her 20 years on the max, but lately her problems have been multiplying. But her parents, both of them, and her perfectly healthy siblings as well, are true saints. I have never seen love as strong as they have.
Preventing the child from reaching her natural potential.
as it's impossible to determine one's lifetime mental capacity in utero
Totally false. I know at least six other couples who have detected conditions in utero that indicate moderate to severe lifetime mental retardation.
But, no, I wouldn't approve thalidomide just like I wouldn't approve amputation. The existence of limbs serves to give any person who has use of those limbs more ability to move, to shift oneself if uncomfortable, to respond to painful stimuli by rolling away without the substantial difficulty that an even mentally normal person has in movement without any limbs. I didn't see if this child can creep, crawl, or roll around like an infant. All of those things can benefit an individual, so no, I wouldn't choose thalidomide because I think it has potential for harm in a way stunting growth does not.
But if the child could not move his arms and legs, your justification for not giving in utero thalidomide disappears.
-A8
Actually, cosmetic plastic surgery, teeth whitening and similar procedures are restorative to a previous, undamaged state, so they fall within th legitimate definition of medicine. As for the perky boobs, it depends... I've read of young college-age women getting breast augmentation which pretty much ruins their breast health, i.e. it slices through their milk ducts and makes it impossible for them to later nurture their babies. I don't reckon many people think of that, and it's a shame.
The ethical use of the medical arts is to cure, heal, preserve, restore, repair, and strengthen the healthy body in all its natural form and function. It's not to "re-engineer" yourself any way you want, as if the body had no proper wholeness of its own.
To create a hypothetical example: if the daughter had, say, a cancer that could only be cured with a drug which would also stunt her growth, that would be justified ethically because the intention was to cure the disease: the stunting would not be desired either as an end, or as a means to an end, but just as a sad but forseeable side-effect.
But to deliberately and intentionally cause stunting as the desired effect --- that's the wrong way to go. These poor burdened parents need help with their daughter. Church, community, charity, insurance, public agencies should provide that, if they can't provide it themselves.
Many people have caregivers who come into their home every day. We have CNA's coming into our home 7 days a week to help care for my father, 92, who is severely mentally and physically debilitated, and weighs 140 pounds. I couldn't do this on my own.
These parents need and deserve help. I repeat, they need CNA's and caregivers --- real human-scale help: not this cruel no-choice option of maiming their poor daughter.
I wonder if you think women who were raped while under the influence of a 'date rape drug', and never discovered it, were in no way harmed, since they never learned what happened to them.
-A8
Did you notice this?
>> After extensive evaluation, the combined opinion of a team of specialists was that the child would have no significant neurologic or cognitive improvements.
That's fortune telling. Doctors are no better at seeing the future than anyone else. Indeed, how many times have we seen patients confound the prognoses of medical specialists? Neither can anyone foretell what new treatments will be available in the future. Medical advances in recent years have been utterly astounding. But it's too late for this child. The doctors have stunted her and sterilized her. They have done irreversible damage to her.
It's not the same thing at all. You have obviously never known anyone with a child who is profoundly mentally disabled and not even able to respond to a parent's attention and love, a child that lies on a blanket in the living room, is fed with a bottle, and even has trouble with normal elimination of body wastes. I knew someone with a child like that, a child who was born normal, but had a reaction to the anesthesia during an operation to put tubes in his ears.
If they had gone medieval, they would have just drowned her in a pond.
I had a son who died at the age of two and a half from a degenerative disease called Krabbes disease. For the last two years of his life, he did nothing, unable to move, unable to see, and unable to swallow, finally unable to breathe. I took care of him every night, all night, feeding him through an NG tube, changing his diapers, bathing him, and suctioning his throat when he choked on his own saliva. And when he finally took his last breath, he did so right next to me in bed.
-A8
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