Posted on 08/28/2009 2:57:32 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Louisiana's top prosecutor said Friday he will not reopen a probe into allegations of euthanasia at a hospital crippled by Hurricane Katrina, despite new statements from a doctor that he drugged a terminal patient to "get rid of her faster."
Dr. Ewing Cook said that as staff at Memorial Medical Center desperately tried to care for and evacuate patients, making spot assessments of which ones might survive, he scribbled "pronounced dead at" on the patient's chart, intending to fill in time and other details later.
"I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor," Cook told ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization, in a report to be published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Maybe he can become the pill czar.
“The people who should be in jail over Katrina all hold or held government positions”
How silly. For one, there were looters.
This whole thing about Katrina and the docs and nurses who stayed and struggled just enrages me. That woman doctor who was stuck in a 100-degree facility with no electricity! No light! No water! Yet she kept on. About the only tool she had was to sedate the patients until help came. Do you realize that they couldn't even open the windows, unless they could break them?
And now she's got all these wrongful death lawsuits.
Physicians--at the first sign of disaster--CUT AND RUN.
Thank you. Sedation may hasten death, but attention must be paid to intent. All of you out there may well want pain meds someday. I read this as the doctor being in battlefield conditions, without battlefield training. He knows a patient is about to demise, starts the chartwork and goes on to another patient. Not many here care that there might be residual spiritual trauma to the physician.
Who, after all, is a doctor and not a lawyer.
I read this as the doctor being in battlefield conditions, without battlefield training. He knows a patient is about to demise, starts the chartwork and goes on to another patient. Not many here care that there might be residual spiritual trauma to the physician.
She didn’t have hope of getting better and he had to make one of those “doctor life and death decisions” without having many alternatives/
I agree, anyone sitting around second guessing what the people on the ground were doing in this situation are just fools. Civilization is gone, help ain’t coming, limited resources, and you are resonsible for hundreds if not more patients with dwindling supplies and anarchy all around you. Nope, not going to play arm chair quarterback. The people who should be in jail over Katrina all hold or held government positions, not the doctors and nurses in the hospitals on the ground.
This same situation will happen again in a major urban earthquake, or another major hurricane or a month-long snowfall and blizzard which cuts off all help, all flights in or out, all ground transportation. Any medical personnel (and I was a medic) will be faced with similarly dire decisions. Triage will be required.
“The people who should be in jail over Katrina all hold or held government positions”
“How silly. For one, there were looters.”
Are you kidding me?
All the money earmarked to upgrade the levies that was siphoned off to fund other things over the years.
The failure of local and state governments to make the evacuation order when they should have.
The abject failure of the local and state governments to follow and execute their own emergency evacuation plans.
The failure of the state and local governments to ASK for federal help, when it was obvious that they could not handle the situation.
The failures of execution by the Federal government when they were finally engaged.
Yep, people were dying in the brackish water of NO, but the person swiping a few dozen beer bottles and wading through the sewage were the problem.
Unbelievable.. there would have been none of what you saw go down in NO had the people in the responsible government positions at the time DONE THE JOBS THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO DO.
This doctor would not have been placed in the position he was in had the powers that be actually done their jobs effectively.
Obviously this was a huge natural disaster, and nothing could have prevented everything, but the overwhelming culpability for what happened in NO falls squarely on the folks who were in government positions, and more than a few still are, failing completely and utterly to do their jobs.
The storm didn’t take out NO, it was the failure to deal with it afterwards that created the mess. Had things been mobilized properly before the storm hit, and had things mobilized properly after it was gone, most of what you saw in NO would have never occurred.
Trying to morally equate the guy with a few beer bottles in brine water, the utter failure of politicians and bureaucrats to do their duties and then play blame game to cover their own butts is pathetic.
Do you hear some people say, "the doc only gave me a month to live, and hear I am! What a quack!" This is very likely a fiction, and the doctor probably gave him a range of expectations based on literature and experience, and gets to be called a quack for his efforts.
Pain meds hasten death. They also get terminally ill patients out of pain.
And sedation can deal with a patient, particularly under adverse circumstances, so you can move on to the next patient.
Well, I read the story over again, and I can see how there can be differences of opinion about it. The doctor seems to me to have made a very questionable decision. He admits that he “hastened her death.” But it is arguable on the evidence given.
Yes, it was an emergency, but I don’t think that necessarily excuses ending a life. The four nurses he mentions could probably have carried her down. And it’s perfectly possible to bring the intravenous drip along—I’ve been in that position myself.
Then if she died, she died, and it couldn’t be helped. But no one deliberately hastened her death.
I don’t know all the factors involved, so maybe no wrong was done.
As for the Grand Jury decision, the article says they were dealing with a couple of other cases. Whatever this doctor did was not known at the time, so he was not under investigation then.
“Yep, people were dying in the brackish water of NO, but the person swiping a few dozen beer bottles and wading through the sewage were the problem.”
I didn’t say they were the main problem, Thick, I said that more than government people belonged in jail contrary to your narrow view.
It was an act of naked, ugly utilitarianism.
Evidence blah blah. When did prove-ability count more than principle?
That’s how I view it. The “doc” admitted intent when he said he was trying to get rid of her to free the nurses or some such poppycock.
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