Free Republic

Hippocratic Out Sarah Carlsruh, October 16, 2009 While he did not equate the current ethics of modern medicine to that of Nazi Germany, at a recent forum, an M.D. did imply that there is an “amoral component” headed in that direction. “One of the first acts of the Nazi government was to legalize voluntary euthanasia,” stated Dr. John Patrick. Reuters reported on September 21st that “assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and physician-assisted suicide—where a doctor prescribes a lethal dose the patient may choose to drink—is legal in the State of Washington, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Oregon.” BBC News reported...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Man gets threatened by Obama thugs for standing up for his handicapped son at Michigan town hall.

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

An op/ed in today's Baltimore Sun has two doctors insisting that physicians refer patients for abortions if they don't wish to do the deed themselves. (The term used is reproductive health, and so it isn't only abortion to which they refer--but it is part of what is meant by the but euphemism.) In complaining about the Bush conscience regulation, that protects health care workers from being discriminated against if they refuse to participate in health procedures they find morally offensive or that is against their religion, the doctors support the must-refer approach. From the column: As health care providers,...

When Your Doctor is a Muslim: Medical Terrorism Comes to America By Debbie Schlussel www.debbieschlussel.com May 17, 2007 Sometimes--so many times--diversity is not what it's cracked up to be. Just ask Joseph Applebaum. Well, you could ask him. But you won't get an answer. He's dead. And he's dead because he was a Jew, and his doctor is a Muslim and grad of "Ayman Al-Zawahiri" Medical School. But Applebaum wasn't denied treatment for being a Jew in Egypt. Or elsewhere in the Muslim world. It happened right here on U.S. soil. In Chicago. As Muslim doctors continue to flood into...

A federal grand jury in Denver has indicted four people on eight counts of arson for a series of eco-terrorism fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. Those indicted are: Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31, and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are presently in federal custody in Oregon, facing separate arson charges. The whereabouts of Overaker and Rubin are unknown. The Two Elks Lodge and other structures on Vail Mountain were burned to the ground on Oct. 19, 1998. Damage was estimated at $12 million. A group called the...

On June 13th, I will have been a physician for twenty five years. Twenty four of those years, exactly one half of my life, will have been spent as a neurologist. I would like, therefore, to state for the record, how grateful I am to have been allowed to practice as a neurologist, during this, the profession’s best of times.When I first began my neurology residency 24 years ago, the practice of neurology was described to me in the phrase “diagnose and adios”. Neurologists were great at diagnosing, based on history and physical examination, where precisely a lesion in the...

Harm DoneCodifying the decline of the medical profession. In 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients being euthanized in the Netherlands sometimes experienced significant side effects (apart from death, that is), such as nausea, convulsions, or coma. This belied the assertion oft made by euthanasia proponents that being killed by a doctor necessarily provides the euphemistic “gentle landing” of euthanasia lore.  Responding to the Netherlands report, the NEJM published an editorial authored by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the bestselling book How We Die and an internationally prominent physician and bioethicist from Yale University. Nuland, a...

BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak openly endorsed murdering other doctors at an animal-rights convention, we expected some skeptics to give Vlasak the benefit of the doubt. Not any more. A stunning piece of audio surfaced ... Listen to Jerry Vlasak at the "Animal Rights 2003" convention as a PCRM representative. We forgave Doubting Thomases for wondering if our notes were accurate, or if we were perhaps making the whole thing up, even after U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) closed a Judiciary Committee hearing by reading, out loud, a letter from the Center for Consumer Freedom...

Earth Liberation Front claims no leaders or spokespeople When three buildings and four chairlifts on Vail Mountain went up in flames in October, 1998, the Earth Liberation Front, an underground environmental movement, proudly took credit for the arson. The Earth Liberation Front claims to be an underground movement with no leadership, membership or spokespeople... Anyone who commits an act of ecoterrorism or sabotage in the name of the environment is welcome to do it under the front's name... Call yourself an "elf" and you're part of the elite, invisible group. Last month, Chelsea D. Gerlach of Portland Ore. and William...

So, Mr. Chief Justice, will it be us or them? Given his first case, we'll know soon enough if new Chief Justice John Roberts is with us or them. It's a control case, a who's-in-charge case. Us or them. The people of Oregon -- me and you, 'cept they live there and we live here -- have twice affirmed through referenda that if a mentally-with-it dying person wants to skip the last part, it's OK for the doctor to prescribe and the pharmacist to fill a fatal prescription. The Oregon Legislature, being the servant of the people that it is,...

Every year about 8 million dogs and cats are brought to shelters in the United States.  They face either adoption or death.  According to the American Humane Society, less than 40% are adopted.  Each year, 500,000 of those put to death had owners who predeceased them and the animals were no longer wanted.   But the scene is changing.  Recently The New York Times reported that 27 states have laws allowing people to establish legal trusts for their animals.  Pets now can be looked after even when they are predeceased by their owner.  Owners get to say in advance how...

During the tumultuous final weeks in the life of Terri Schiavo, the young woman who died in a Florida hospice in April, press reports in the nation’s media typically focused on the bitter conflicts among members of her family over her treatment, disagreements among consultants over her state of consciousness, and the increasingly intense arguments in legislatures and the courts over her guardianship. Since her death, the case and the story of her death and dying have been mined for their bearing on our ongoing culture wars and for the debate over the place of “values” in our politics. In...

How do I start a chapter in my county?1. Commit to the vision of the Association of Pro-life Physicians.  We are very enthusiastic about starting other chapters around the nation, and we are very flexible in our requirements of chapters.  At the very least you must agree to the basic pro-life principles and main goals of the APP as delineated under “Who Are We?”  It is important to be as focused as possible on these aims so as not to alienate otherwise pro-life physicians with a plethora of diverse opinions and activities with which they may disagree.2. Write or speak...

Effort to enable discrimination against pro-abortion physicians:: In an effort to enable patients to discriminate against pro-abortion physicians, a doctor in Ohio is developing a list of providers who subscribe to the pro-life plank of the Hippocratic oath. The Association of Pro-Life Physicians has nine physicians in the Zanesville, Ohio, area from several medical specialties. "We are presently in the middle of an aggressive educational campaign to inform the community who the pro-life physicians are, so as to allow patients to discriminate against physicians who will kill their patients or who will refer for abortions.," said Patrick Johnston. Johnston said...

God’s standard of morality and justice is His law, and the commandment “Thou shalt not murder” has not been amended for women in crisis pregnancies. No one has the right to kill an innocent human being. This truth does not diminish with a democratic consensus that rejects it. Man cannot nullify the command of God Almighty. The Supreme Court of heaven overrules the inferior courts of earth in every case in which the inferior courts have the audacity to rebel against His Majesty.

ROME -- Catholic doctors warned that the new practice in Holland to euthanize children is another step towards a society in which life is not respected. The World Federation of the Catholic Medical Associations published a statement in response to the decision to allow Groningen University Hospital to euthanize children under 12 when their suffering is intolerable, or if they have an incurable illness. The document states that this initiative "is another violent laceration of the very fundamentals of our social coexistence." "Officially aimed at putting an end to 'unbearable suffering,' in fact it permits the killing of human beings...

Only in an emergency would FedEx do business with UPS, and some doctors have begun taking the same approach with trial lawyers: they'll treat a lawyer if it's a matter of life or limb, but an aching back may have to keep on hurting. The matter came to a head last month at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, where one physician proposed an official policy that would exclude trial lawyers from medical care. The resolution was soundly defeated, but the principle lives on. "It's a symptom of the extreme frustration that physicians feel about the medical liability...

I'm not sure where in this forum this posting belongs. I heard Dr. Edell pontificating on this subject today, and there's no way to appropriately reference his comments here as a news item. Today, the good Doctor was excoriating the FDA, whom he claims are now just lackeys of President Bush, whom he claims is promoting idiotic policies based on his own religious fanaticism. Specifically, he was complaining that the FDA is balking at rubber-stamping the approval of an over-the-counter "Morning After" pill. What bothered me more, though, was what he said next. He basically stated that medical and scientific...

A national physician's group has approved a pro-life resolution at its annual meeting, stating the doctors' Hippocratic oath does not allow them to perform abortions. The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, at its 60th annual meeting in Point Clear, Ala., last month, adopted a platform that "clearly opposes" the procedure and recognizes the "teachings of the major religions of the world have [also] opposed abortion of a developing human child until very recent times." "Even if religion is removed from the issue of abortion of a human child, without life as the ultimate ethic, no objective ethical standard remains,"...

Former Vermont governor and physician Howard Dean touts his medical experience as a reason to support his run for the presidency — and well he should. Medicine is a noble calling — when, that is, doctors adhere to "Do no harm" values. Unfortunately, Dean's recent support of assisted suicide and euthanasia shows that he apparently doesn't believe in the Hippocratic values that have served doctors and their patients so well for 2,500 years. The Hippocratic Oath requires physicians to protect the lives and welfare of their patients and "keep them from harm and injustice." Toward this end, the Hippocratic doctor...