Posted on 08/13/2012 3:43:08 AM PDT by markomalley
A judge has ordered that doctors can switch off a young boy’s life-support system even though his devout Christian parents pleaded for him to be kept alive in case of a miracle.
Mr Justice Ryder said there was no hope of the eight-year-old recovering from lung failure after a “tragic decline in health” and it would be wrong to keep him alive and possibly in pain on a machine.
He paid tribute to the boy’s parents and teenage sister, who told the High Court that they believed he was still conscious and that there was still a chance of divine intervention saving him.
But the judge said that “with a heavy heart” he had to agree to the hospital’s request to withdraw life-sustaining treatment as doctors and nurses agreed that all further interventions would be futile.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
So true, but the little American voters don't understand this.
Tough question, one that occurred to me as well.
Under the same circumstances, I'd want my child to live too and when I had spent all my resources, I'd still want him to live, though the decision to keep trying, would no longer be mine to make.
An ecmo machine is not intended for long term use and creates medical problems of it’s own. It is used to relieve stress on the heart and lungs allowing them to heal. From reading this and the rather limited medical info given, it sounds like that is not happening.
It is a difficult and painful decision for parents to make. Dear friends of ours made it with the prayers of FReepers asking God for wisdom and comfort.
I pray for the child and his family.
And there is the problem with Government Run Healthcare, otherwise known as the NHS, Obamacare or RomneyCare. The government officials can make a cost benefit analysis on one’s treatment and decide to stop treatment and cause a person to die.
However, at least for now, we are lucky to have a system of Private Insurance Companies none of which would ever make a cost benefit analysis on someone’s medical treatment and decide to stop treatment and cause a person to die.
Amen! in the Name of Jesus Christ!
Sometimes everything that can be done has been done. High
freq ventilation is not a long term solution,it is maximum
support. And ECMO is similar to being on heart-lung bypass
as during openheart surgery(which folks are on for a couple of hours). A month of it is longer than i’ve ever heard of. If you read the story, the little guy was born early, had corrective heart surgery and a subsequent surgery did not go well. Life is fragile. Not everything can be fixed all
the time.
He has received extremely intensive,maxed out life support and surgeries,based on the article. The reason we are hearing about this is that most parents agree to discontinue treatment when the time comes,and sounds like
his are not.
I’ve heard of pts on ECMO for weeks or months & I believe the longest was 180 days.
The point here is who’s decision is this? Certainly not the gov’s
2. My point is a legitimate one.
3. There's nothing wrong or irrational about discussing legitimate points about the costs (financial and others) of providing medical care in difficult (likely futile) cases?
4. Please cite me one piece of documented evidence to support a claim that it is somehow "conservative" to provide medical care indefinitely to a patient under any circumstances?
For anyone who might be offended by the questions I'm asking here, please note that there is an enormous distinction under any objective moral code between removing a patient's "life support" and starving them to death. If a society didn't have limits on the kinds of heroic efforts it would employ to keep people alive at all costs, we could theoretically keep everyone "alive" indefinitely.
You have my sympathy, and I absolutely understand your point about making decisions without any consideration for costs in the long run. But there is always going to be a limit to how far any medical treatment can go in terms of saving a person’s life. This is why, for example, there isn’t a single religious group on the planet whose moral theology includes an absolute mandate that a person must be kept on a mechanical life support system indefinitely, in the name of preserving human life.
That's an excellent question, and a great demonstration of why the legal mechanisms surrounding a government-run medical system can make it so dangerous. A government that legally prohibits anyone from paying the cost of medical care for themselves or their family members has no moral right to exist.
Of course, but you asked whether the parents might feel differently if they were paying the bill themselves. In my opinion they would not.
Your question had nothing to do with the “moral theology” of it, and neither does the story. Governments make these decisions based solely on dollars and cents, and that’s what happened here.
The further medical decisions move from the patients (say, to the IPAB,) the less likely they will be made with any moral considerations.
I suspect we agree on that.
Any government system must place such restrictions on the market. Remember, that was a key component of HillaryCare...
It is all about centralized control leading to equality of outcome. As a result, we must not ALLOW people to be free of any government restriction!
I don’t know for certain, but I would be confident in placing a bet that the restrictions are in place in the UK system.....
I’d also like to point out that without more information I cannot clearly see the situation fully, however I was born nearly 3 mos early and was on breathing support for weeks. I don’t remember ;-) the specific technology, but it was very expensive in that time.
If we had the same system then that the UK has today, my bet is that I would not be living today. Hmm, maybe I better get out there and do more stuff to improve the world!
Then that says something about sad about the state of your moral development. I hope that you can learn to approach the issue of the valuation of human life with an open mind and heart.
2. My point is a legitimate one.
The utilitarian argument rationalizing the state-sponsored murdered of a conscious 8 year old boy is never legitimate. This is despite the best efforts of this argument's most famous advocates: sociopaths like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.
3. There's nothing wrong or irrational about discussing legitimate points about the costs (financial and others) of providing medical care in difficult (likely futile) cases?
Once one steps over the line of quantifying the material worth of an innocent child, they have committed the grave ethical error of objectifying human life. Also, the "futility" of this case was maintained only by those advocating for murder. Even someone who is totally morally bankrupt should be able to see see the potential for abuse if the organization responsible for paying for life sustaining healthcare are the exact same people deciding who lives and who dies. Before long, nearly everyone will be considered "futile".
4. Please cite me one piece of documented evidence to support a claim that it is somehow "conservative" to provide medical care indefinitely to a patient under any circumstances?
No one here is advocating that "medical care (be provided) indefinitely to a patient under any circumstances". That fallacious strawman argument aside; libertarians, communists, and anarchists are all in agreement that human life is worth little more than what it can produce. Conservatives stand alone in their ideology of treating all innocent human life as sacrosanct and worthy of basic medical care, such as keeping this child on life support so his lung can heal. See my profile page for an example of such efforts from the author of modern conservatism. I hope that you can approach these responses with the charity with which they are offered.
Very well-said. Thank you
Again -- this is not about the "value of a life." It's about whether there is a legal or moral obligation to provide this kind of medical treatment ... which represents an expensive and limited "good" in cases like this ... indefinitely. While nobody likes to look at anything like this in financial terms, the reality is that financial constraints will often dictate courses of treatment in these cases. The doctors and medical staff aren't working for free, the hospital building wasn't constructed for free, the electric bills must be paid, and the life-saving equipment and drugs all cost money.
Any time you have a third party paying the medical bills, you've effectively surrendered a lot of authority to determine your preferred courses of treatment. And this holds true regardless of whether the third party is a government agency or a private insurance company.
As far as a miracle from God is concerned I'll paraphrase from the pastor of the last church I attended: I don't want to impugn divine intervention, but there hasn't been a soul on earth that God hasn't called home. We pray for healing miracles because we want God to operate on our time table, not his.
Well, I’m going to disagree with you there. ECMO isn’t going to keep anyone alive indefinitely. The path of least resistance here would have been to keep him on the machine until he passes, which honestly can’t be more than just a few weeks away. He’s already lived remarkably long on the machine.
As far as a miracle from God is concerned I'll paraphrase from the pastor of the last church I attended: I don't want to impugn divine intervention, but there hasn't been a soul on earth that God hasn't called home. We pray for healing miracles because we want God to operate on our time table, not his.
No argument with what you're saying.
The issue is not the futility of the care, in my opinion. The issue is who makes that determination.
In the case of State-sponsored healthcare, the determiner is the government (remember that the doctors in question had their salaries paid by the government)...with only the courts for appeal.
In the case of commercial insurers (remember that, in that case, the doctors fees were paid by the insurer), the determiner would be the insurance company...with only the state insurance oversight board...and then the courts...for appeal.
In a truly free market system, the determiner would be the patient...or, if the patient is incapacitated, the patient's family. If they wished to continue with objectively futile care, that is their business as long as they had the capacity to do so. If they were paying the tab and the attending physician refused to provide the care, they could simply find another physician who was willing to do so. Or the patient could decide that it is not worth making his/her family destitute for care that would, at best, extend the life a little while.
As you said, in this case, it was clearly futile. However, in a third party payer type system, will they change the standard for futility when resources become more scarce? (for example, 80 year old widow needs hip replacement...sorry, granny, we deem this futile, since you'll only last a few more years anyway...better to spend our limited resources on a healthy 20 or 30 something who has decades left)(for example, care for lung cancer is no longer authorized as you shouldn't have been smoking anyway)
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