"Nevermind."
Posted on 12/27/2007 12:00:37 PM PST by wagglebee
Pro-family activist Janet Fogler says a case in Australia, in which a young man was taken off life support against his family's wishes, is becoming more commonplace.
Paulo Melo, 29, was placed on life support after suffering brain and spinal injuries from a December 5 car accident. Melo's family insisted he was making progress, moving his head and eyes in response to family visits. But despite their pleas, the Royal Darwin Hospital switched off the life support -- claiming his case was futile. The family was denied a court injunction during the ordeal.
"We're talking about a 29-year-old man, who is trying to verbalize, whose family says 'he is trying to speak,'" says Folger. "He's moving his eyes and head in response to his family's visits. But doctors say 'hey, his life is futile, so we're going to remove the care he needs'. In this case, everybody wanted this young man to live except the doctors."
Folger points out that Texas has a Futile Care Law that not only jeopardizes patients on life support, but even endangers patients who receive food-and-water life support. With those types of laws, she says, the doctor's decisions are usually favored over family members. Patients cannot be allowed to die for convenience, and because insurance companies are pressuring hospitals to discontinue expensive care, she argues.
When life is no longer the primary focus of medicine, it will constantly get moved ever lower on the list of priorities.
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Youth in Asia have always been more common.......
"Nevermind."
That plus the flood of head-choppers rushing in, and it looks like life expectancy is getting mighty low.
What if everyone had fifteen years of life support in an ICU before death?
There's something to be said for packing it in like a man.
As an aside to the obvious problem, many years ago, I had a teacher who predicted that something or many bad things were going to happen in the future because people had lost touch with the very idea of death.
That is, many, perhaps most of the people in the US have never seen anything die or any large creature that was dead. And without that knowledge and experience, they are bound to become increasingly bizarre in how they react to the entire subject of death.
She speculated that one of two things would happen. Either people would utterly shut death and dying out of their lives trying to pretend it away; or that they would become utterly cold and calloused about death.
In the former case, she was afraid that elderly and sick people would be taken out of society out of the fear that they could die where people could see them. That people would be more traumatized by their having observed death than that another person had actually died. A delusion that death did not exist, or that seeing death somehow injured you.
In the latter case, that ignorance of death would make killing as easy to some people as turning off a light switch. It just wouldn’t matter to them at all. They could enter a room and give a dozen people injections of poison while being indifferent to the fact that they were killing them.
In either case, she said that the end result would be a nightmare.
I added Texas to the topic list because of the statement above. As the push toward guberment-controlled health care continues, that law will loom larger and larger for the aging boomers. "We're here for your liver" will cease to be comedy.
Here is what I think will happen: As more and more people see their parents totally incapacitated for years, totally dependent, in a state they would never want to be in themselves, they will start to discreetly skip all those recommended doctor visits and medical tests at a certain point.
Fifteen years? This was barely 15 days, taking the article at face value.
Fifteen years in the ICU is not a moral obligation. Food and water (nutrition and hydration)-— and other forms of “ordinary care” -— are a moral obligation, The big problem is that bad legislation (like the TX Futile Care Law) is defining food as a “treatment”or an ambiguous category like “life support.” Geez. If it were, I’d charge my health insurance company every time I go to the grocery story.
If he was placed on life support only a few weeks ago it was too early to tell whether or not he might have recovered. There are many cases where patients have recovered after months in a coma. If the physical injury to his brain was such that no recovery has possible, why was he placed on life support in the first place? This case seems like over zealous bureaucrats trying to balance their year end budget by cutting care.
There's something to be said for packing it in like a man.
Listen newbie, you may have made a mistake and come to the wrong place because Free Republic is a PRO-LIFE forum. And if you had bothered to read the article, he was injured in early December and was dead within a couple of weeks.
When your time is near, and you're gasping for that very last breath, then you'll know a little something about living and dying and what it takes to be a man.
Please clarify. When you issue such cryptic comments it arouses questions, which I have now.
Your comment suggests you know something about packing it in like a man, yet, you call yourself an Iowa farm girl. It is very confusing. Are you an Iowa farm girl?
And also you talk about someone having fifteen years of life support. Do you have someone specific in mind?
What do you think of the Texas Futile Care law?
Then, I will understand a whole lot better.
8mm
If you go back and read mwollstonecraft’s posts on other threads, it is very clear that she is a TROLL. There are several comments about how Iran could be an ally, there were no WMDs in Iraq, we should have left Saddam alone, etc.
She is either a leftist troll or a MoRon Paulistinian, not that there’s much difference.
Perhaps you should read more about this story. Then maybe take a look at what morphine does to breathing. It is not hard to imagine what that would do for someone just coming off a ventilator.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1941645/posts?page=91#91
The troll can’t respond any more.
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