Tag Archives: Active Euthanasia

News

Man in persistent vegetative state wakes up after 12 years

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This story is from the ultra-leftist National Public Radio, of all places.

Excerpt:

It was the late ’80s, and young Martin Pistorius, growing up in South Africa, was mostly thinking about electronics. Resistors and transistors and you name it.

But at age 12, his life took an unexpected turn. He came down with a strange illness. The doctors weren’t sure what it was, but their best guess was cryptococcal meningitis.

He got progressively worse. Eventually he lost his ability to move by himself, his ability to make eye contact, and then, finally, his ability to speak.

His parents, Rodney and Joan Pistorius, were told that he was as good as not there, a vegetable. The hospital told them to take him home and keep him comfortable until he died.

But he didn’t die. “Martin just kept going, just kept going,” his mother says.

His father would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to the special care center where he’d leave him.

“Eight hours later, I’d pick him up, bathe him, feed him, put him in bed, set my alarm for two hours so that I’d wake up to turn him so that he didn’t get bedsores,” Rodney says.

That was their lives, for 12 years.

This part was the most interesting to me:

Joan vividly remembers looking at Martin one day and saying: ” ‘I hope you die.’ I know that’s a horrible thing to say,” she says now. “I just wanted some sort of relief.”

And she didn’t think her son was there to hear it.

But he was.

“Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up,” says Martin, now age 39 and living in Harlow, England.

He thinks he began to wake up when he was 14 or 15 years old. “I was aware of everything, just like any normal person,” Martin says.

But although he could see and understand everything, he couldn’t move his body.

“Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn’t notice when I began to be present again,” he says. “The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that — totally alone.”

He was trapped, with only his thoughts for company. And they weren’t particularly nice thoughts.

“No one will ever show me tenderness. No one will ever love me.”

And of course there was no way to escape. He thought, “You are doomed.”

[…]“You don’t really think about anything,” Martin says. “You simply exist. It’s a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish.”

[…]“The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words,” Martin says.

Eventually, Martin was able to come out of his persistent vegetative state by mental effort, over a long period of time. The NPR story has a nice picture of Martin and his wife, where he is holding her hand. So his story had a happy ending.

Commentary

MUST-READ: A medical doctor explains how Obamacare fails patients

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This American Thinker essay is awesome, and was sent to me by ECM.

The author gives the physician’s perspective on Obama’s government-run health care plan.

First, Pollard explains that Medicare is not providing good service now because it is rationing care.

Excerpt:

I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.

Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.

Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point — rationing of care.

Over the past 35 years I have cared for over 1000 children born with congenital cataracts. In older children and in adults the vision is rehabilitated with an intraocular lens. In newborns we use contact lenses which are very expensive. It takes Medicaid over one year to approve a contact lens post cataract surgery. By that time a successful anatomical operation is wasted as the child will be close to blind from a lack of focusing for so long a period of time.

Again, extreme rationing. Solution: I have a foundation here in Atlanta supported 100% by private funds which supplies all of these contact lenses for my Medicaid and illegal immigrants children for free. Again, waiting for the government would be disastrous.

That is what happens when the government is the single-payer for treatment. Long delays, waiting lists, rationing. The solutions are all with the private free market, not with the government.

The rest of the article contains other examples of problems with government-run health care:

  • how Sweden’s government-run health care system puts people on waiting lists
  • how Medicare is slow to reimburse doctors for services performed
  • how government-run care in the military is rationed
  • how the British government-run system denies care to the elderly
  • the consequences of billing the government for care instead of paying your doctor what they ask for
  • the real story about whether the uninsured receive care

But there is one point you may never have heard before, and I want to cite this last point in full.

In the free market, doctors compete with other doctors to provide the best care for the patient at the lowest price. But the government is run by politically correct social engineers who make rules based on what seems fair to them. And often, what seems fair to them is racial discrimination and gender-discrimination in the form of affirmative action programs. And that has consequences for you.

Excerpt:

One last thing: with this new healthcare plan there will be a tremendous shortage of physicians. It has been estimated that approximately 5% of the current physician work force will quit under this new system. Also it is estimated that another 5% shortage will occur because of the decreased number of men and women wanting to go into medicine. At the present time the US government has mandated gender equity in admissions to medical schools .That means that for the past 15 years that somewhere between 49 and 51% of each entering class are females. This is true of private schools also, because all private schools receive federal funding.

The average career of a woman in medicine now is only 8-10 years and the average work week for a female in medicine is only 3-4 days. I have now trained 35 fellows in pediatric ophthalmology. Hands down the best was a female that I trained 4 years ago — she was head and heels above all others I have trained. She now practices only 3 days a week.

Don’t let the government run your health care plan, do it yourself. There are other ways to reduce costs that do not involve rationing of care.

Commentary

Head NIH bioethicist supports health care rationing by age and quality of life

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In another article from Secondhand Smoke sent to me by ECM, Wesley J. Smith writes about Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s chief bioethicist at the NIH. It turns out that Emanuel has written about rationing health care based on age (at least in some cases) and quality of life.

Here are Emanuel’s own words:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-yearolds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

And he also wrote:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

I think we need to be careful about electing people who want to make all our decisions for us.