8mm
Posted on 01/12/2008 12:19:01 PM PST by wagglebee
Thank you!!
The first has never been morally or legally required, and is very dubious ethically; and the last is murder, and results in the corruption of patients, doctors, families, and institutions.
The really humane option is a skilled, ethically-run hospice program --- and the best, if you can manage it, is in-home hospice services.
There is no medical reason for intractable pain in terminal patients. This was true even 30 years ago, and even moreso today; although one doctor told me, "I have never seen intractable pain; but I have seen intractable doctors and nurses."
The Oregon record over the past 10 years shows that virtually nobody who chose suicide, chose it because of pain. It would have been "absolutely" nobody, if they had gotten the appropriate narcotic and analgesic medication.
You might want to look at the argument that the suicide option works against palliative care , and these insights by an experienced medical practitioner as well ("What Have We Learned ABout Death With Dignity in regon in the Past Ten years?"). Of the many arguments that have been made in favor of suicide, the ones that are provably false are the ones about inevitable futile high-tech expense and/or pain in terminal cases.
An excellent post! My father lost the battle to cancer in the hospice setting. I have high regard to this method of care. The last hours for my father was a time of prayer, Communion, and close family love. I wish others could experience the last hours of a fellow human being in the way we did. There was little pain when he went.
Some advocates of the Oregon physician-assisted suicide system brush off criticism because they say there are "safeguards" aainst abuse.
The safegards? Zero. Oregon has no staff to investigate even the most egregious cases, no budget to pay for independent investigation, and no penalties for ANY physician action wth lethal outcome, if the physician can claim he acted in good faith," the lack of which is almost impossible to prove. The statistical analysis in their annual reports depends entirely on unverified death doctor self-reporting.
The only "protection" built into the law is that the death-dealing doctor is protected from any liability.
Take a look at this if you want a different view of Oregon's "suicide successes."
I remember how my grandfather described the end for his beloved wife of over 50 years - he and some friends who were also in the Hemlock society sat down stairs in the living room and waited for her to pick up the gun my grandfather always kept in the nightstand and blow her head off, which she did.
About 5 years later, he did the same, only he didn't aim so good, and just blew his face off, and died over the course of a week or so. My dad flew out immediately, and I was going to as well - this was the grandfather I was named after, sailed to Puerto Vallarta with twice when I was a kid and many dozens of other times - but decided not to after my dad implored me not to, with a great deal of horror in his voice. And then there was my grandmother on my Dad's side, a saintly woman who spent her days listening to gospel on the radio, as she had been completely blind for over 20 years, living with my dad for the last 10.
She spent her last month in a nursing home with ailments that decimated her body. I had been out of state, and hadn't realized how far she'd regressed. I went with my dad to visit her, and though the shape under the covers was a fraction of the size I expected, she was perfectly lucid, we had a nice conversation, including what was happening, and, I would have sworn, for a few minutes there, could see perfectly when she looked into my eyes and made me promise to be saved.
My dad and I went back to his place, and by the time we got there, the nursing home had called to say she quietly slipped away minutes after we left.
I don't judge my other grandparents, but I did realize the difference between a traumatic horror and a beautiful sending off, neither of which I will ever forget.
Thank you for sharing that, it certainly shows a stark contrast.
Joel Connolly rocks!
It is selfish for someone to screw up the medical and legal systems I and my children depend on for health and freedom, so that they can have another made up right. If we really believed death with dignity was a right we'd have a 10 mile per hour national speed limit, because people who die in car accidents don't die with dignity.
Exceelllent post. My wife, an RN who works with the elderly, would agree wholeheartedly with that doctor.
What a great post.
That "burden" also includes spending his grandchildren's college money.
Individual freedom is, however, not absolute. It can be limited when an individual's actions harm the self, the family or the human family.
To ignore the inherent trade-off here that puts us in a position where we MUST make unpleasant choices is equally immoral. I'm going to glom two pieces I've been dabbling with to make this clearer:
We all know what is going to happen with Social Security and MediCare. They will go bankrupt on the back end of the baby boom. There is a simple reason for this beyond demographic numbers:
So the working public, having a conscience, pays for such services without recognizing the corollary to the above fact:
2. One can always dream up more ways of spending more of other people's money in order to make life more pleasant, especially those providing services to the recipients.
The longer we live, the more expensive dealing with aging becomes. That means working people, who are asked to pay the taxes then have less to invest in future productive children. Less productive children will then have a harder time bearing the cost of supporting more of the elderly, each living longer and each demanding ever more expensive services…
It's a downward spiral. We all know it. At root, it's a moral problem. We all fear a lingering death alone without loved ones. What we've done is to subsidize it and the businesses that live off the system.
Social Security helps older folks stay in their homes instead of forcing them to impose upon their kids, which at first sounds humane to both. Consider however, the economic use of the housing stock when an aging couple or an elderly woman stays in a home large enough to accommodate a full family. That means those homes are not available to young families who need the space. The resulting increased demand for housing forces young families to pay higher prices and thus stay in debt for decades longer. Most often they then have to purchase housing they can afford far from work in remote suburbs. That means they spend less time with their children. It raises daycare costs at a time when they can least afford it. It also inhibits early savings for college…
Social security ends up alienating the aged from their families, too often to live alone and friendless and, as a result, dying at an earlier age. Isolating the elderly from young people removes the opportunity for the elderly to teach their history or culture to succeeding generations. The elderly end up feeling less valued, while the State and media are free to revise history and culture at will. We all know where that goes.
What's this to do with social liberalism? The people who brought us Social Security and the welfare state were communists. Their answer?
They work to make the process of dying more attractive, whether it's abortion, "assisted suicide," gay lifestyles (gay males live an average of 57 years), getting public school children used to death with games of "lifeboat," loose sex, extreme sports...
In a free society, health care choices are necessarily individual, but given the uneven chance that an individual will incur catastrophic healthcare expenses, individuals must pool resources to fund health coverage, usually by means of insurance.
When healthcare was funded by a single family, funds were necessarily limited; a family would not starve its children to treat the sick or aged. The amount of effort to save a single life that could be spent has changed for two reasons:
2. Pooling healthcare resources has vastly increased the money available to be spent on any one case.
In effect, the “family” now paying for the service is the entire insurance pool. That pool, or its agent, the insurer, then has a say in what they will fund, just as the family once did. So now, instead of a family refusing to starve, we have an insurer refusing to go broke. It's a tradeoff. We have more funds available for any one individual, but less control over how they are spent. As long as technology is increasing the upper bounds of what might be spent, we, as a pool, face hard choices about what we can afford. When a moral imperative to make an infinite commitment to save any one life meets a technical ability to bankrupt the pool, somebody MUST lose in the pursuit of saving that one life.
As the pool enlarges to a global perspective, the moral problem takes on a new dimension, and "the least of mine," takes on a whole new meaning. The money being spent on Terri Shiavo could feed, clothe, medicate, and educate ten thousand children who will otherwise die.
We have to find ways to make hard moral choices in order to contain costs. It's inescapable.
Seventy percent of your medical dollar (or nearly eight percent of the national economy)is spent upon people who die within six months. Meanwhile, pregnant mothers still don't get decent prenatal care that would prevent life-long medical expenses and aliens enter the country carrying hepatitis, parasites, and antibiotic-resistant strains of infectious diseases that go untreated. Hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy caring for the indigent. Private insurance rates bear much of that cost as a hidden tax in hospital charges.
We have no other choice than to limit the size of the money pool, else the system WILL fail and the society with it. That is why we must gradually shift from a system based upon taxes to one based upon family savings.
Home hospice is inherently low-tech and high-touch. It comes into play when you realize there is no real option to go on with drugs, chemo, surgery, dialysis, ventilators, pointless diagnostics, or any other kind of intervention, because the patient is truly dying of the underlying disease or injury.
At that point, you opt out of futile treatments, and legitimately concentrate on comfort care and, if I can call it this way, the "social and spiritual surround."
The dying person (no longer really a "patient") can be nourished and hydrated, pain-free and comfortable. Even with a feeding tube this is not expensive: at the time my mother was dying it was about $7 a day for the nutritional formula; and with my father, who never had a tube, he was happy to eat ice-cream three times a day (though I did keep up the nutritional shakes and smoothies as well.)
Family members arrive from across the country, visitors come: neighbors who are fellow-parishioners came and gave him Holy Communion every Sunday, and our assistant pastor actually gave him the Last Rites twice: once a months before his death, and then he rallied unexpctedly for a couple of weeks; and then again the day before he died.
By the way, he had sold the house and given away all his money years before he died, in increments of I think $10,000 per gift to his children, so there was no income tax and, after his burial, no estate at all.
This was the way to go. No hospital wires and buzzers, no unnecessary prolongation of the final dying process, no damnable lethal doses: just loving care, and peace.
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