Tag Archives: Doctor

News

NHS horror story: neglected patient calls police for water, dies of thirst

3 Comments

I spotted this UK Daily Mail story on my FB feed from bioethicist Wesley J. Smith.

Excerpt:

A young patient who died of dehydration at a leading teaching hospital phoned police from his bed because he was so thirsty, an inquest heard yesterday.

Officers arrived at Kane Gorny’s bedside, but were told by nurses that he was in a confused state and were sent away.

The keen footballer and runner, 22, died of dehydration a few hours later.

A coroner had such grave concerns about the case that she referred it to police.

Yesterday an inquest was told how Mr Gorny died after blunders and neglect by ‘lazy and careless’ medical staff at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, South London.

His mother Rita Cronin, a civil servant told Westminster Coroner’s Court that staff tutted at her and repeatedly refused to listen to her concerns that her son hadn’t been given vital medication.

At one point he became so desperate and upset that staff sedated and restrained him – and on the night before his death, his mother said, he was not checked on by medical staff, despite being in a room on his own.

[…]When he arrived at hospital for the hip operation, nurses assured the family they would give him his medication and said: ‘Don’t worry, he’s in good hands – we’ll look after him.’

But, despite the repeated reminders and insistence by both Mr Gorny and his family, staff failed to give him the tablets and he became severely dehydrated after being refused water.

In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2010, Miss Cronin said of the nurses who treated him: ‘They were lazy, careless and hadn’t bothered to check his charts and see his medication was essential. He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’

Yesterday Miss Cronin told the inquest she received a distressed phone call from her son on May 27, 2009, in which he told her he’d called the police because he was so desperate for a drink.

[…]She then went to the hospital where she found him ‘confused and angry’, shouting at staff and behaving in an uncharacteristically abusive manner.

Despite this, one doctor asked if he was ‘coming off the booze’ and another asked if he was ‘always like this’. Miss Cronin said: ‘He sounded really, really distressed. He said “They won’t give me anything to drink”. ‘He also said “I’ve called the police. You better get here quickly: they’re all standing around the bed getting their stories straight”.’

When Miss Cronin arrived, she recalled: ‘They weren’t doing anything. They seemed out of their depth. It felt like the two locum doctors were nervous about calling anyone more senior than them.’

The inquest heard Mr Gorny was restrained by security guards and sedated with strong medication to calm him down. Later, he was put into a side room and left alone.

Miss Cronin said she sat in his room for three hours the night before he died without a single nurse checking on him or giving him vital medicine.

Dr. Smith also linked to this article where doctors have to prescribe water to patients in order to ensure that they do not die of dehydration in the NHS. This is what you get in a secular socialist system of health care where you pay through your working life and then when you ask for health care, you get in line, because they spent your money buying votes from people with “free” breast implants, sex changes, abortions, contraceptives and IVF.  Is that health care?

The benefit of the free enterprise system with respect to health care is that you keep your money in your pocket and you pay for quality health care at the best price. No one complains about Amazon.com, they only complain about the Department of Motor Vehicles. There is a reason for that. Amazon has to compete for your business, but government monopolies don’t. You have no choice when it comes to government monopolies. They don’t care. They get paid anyway.

News

Dad rescues “brain dead” son from organ-harvesting doctors, son recovers

3 Comments

From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

According to the Daily Mail newspaper, a young British man owes his life to an insistent father who would not allow his son’s organs to be removed from his body, despite assurances from four doctors that his son could not recover from the wounds he had suffered in a recent car accident.

The Mail reports that Stephen Thorpe, then 17, was placed in a medically-induced coma following a multi-car pileup that had already taken the life of his friend Matthew, who was driving the vehicle.

Although a team of four physicians insisted that his son was “brain-dead” following the wreck, Thorpe’s father enlisted the help of a general practitioner and a neurologist, who demonstrated that his son still had brain wave activity.  The doctors agreed to bring him out of the coma, and five weeks later Thorpe left the hospital, having almost completely recovered.

Today, the 21-year-old with “brain damage” is studying accounting at a local university. “‘My impression is maybe the hospital weren’t very happy that my father wanted a second opinion,” he told the Mail.

The article lists a few more examples:

In 2011, the Quebec Hospital Sainte Croix de Drummondville sought permission to extract the eyes of a patient who had choked on hospital food in the absence of a nurse, claiming she was “brain dead.” After the family demanded proof from physicians of her alleged condition, she regained consciousness, and recovered most of her faculties. The family declared its intention to sue the hospital.

In 2008, a 45-year-old Frenchman revived on the operating table as doctors prepared to “harvest” his organs for donation, following cardiac arrest. In the subsequent investigation by the hospital’s ethics committee, a number of doctors admitted that such cases, while rare, were well known to them.

That same year, a “brain dead” 21-year-old American, Zack Dunlap, was about to have his organs harvested when his two sisters, both nurses, decided to test the hospital’s theory that his brain was no longer functioning. Family members poked his feet with a knife and dug their fingernails under his nails, provoking strong reactions by Dunlap and proving he was conscious. He recovered completely. He later related that he was conscious and aware as doctors discussed harvesting his organs in his presence.

Wow. My buddy ECM likes to talk about “ghouls” who like to profit from practices like abortion. Well, I don’t think he’s going to find a better example of ghoulishness than these doctors.

News

UK doctors filmed agreeing to perform illegal sex-selection abortions

4 Comments

Mary sent me this article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such “sex-selection” procedures.

[…]The disclosures will add to growing concerns about the regulation of abortion clinics and the apparent ability of women to secure terminations “on demand”.

The Daily Telegraph carried out an investigation into sex-selection abortions after concerns were raised that the procedures were becoming increasingly common for cultural and social reasons.

[…]Acting on specific information, undercover reporters accompanied pregnant women to nine clinics in different parts of the country. In three instances doctors were recorded offering to arrange terminations after being told the mother-to-be did not want to go ahead with the pregnancy because of the sex of the unborn child.

One consultant, Prabha Sivaraman, who works for both private clinics and NHS hospitals in Manchester, was filmed telling a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female foetus: “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination”.

[…]Miss Sivaraman, who works for Pall Mall Medical in Manchester and is an obstetrician and gynaecologist at North Manchester General Hospital, said the cost of the termination would be £200 or £300, on top of the £500 already paid to the clinic for the consultation.

[…]The doctor booked the pregnant woman in for a termination the following week despite the reason for the abortion being clearly explained.

Another consultant, Claudine Domoney, who works with 132 Healthwise clinic in Harley Street, central London, agreed to arrange for a woman to abort a boy after being told that she and her husband already had a son from his first marriage. The practice is known as “family balancing”.

In a consultation room in the Chelsea and Westminster hospital, the woman, who was about 18 weeks pregnant, explained her reasons for the termination “It’s a boy, and that’s the reason, we don’t want to have a second boy.”

“It’s obviously taken a little bit of time to decide this?” asked Miss Domoney, in reference to the fact that the woman was 18 weeks pregnant.

The consultant was still happy to proceed but explained that as she was going away she would be unable to perform the procedure, so she telephoned a colleague to see if he could fit the pregnant woman in for the following week. “He is OK for Tuesday”, said Miss Domoney when she returned.

Here’s a second article about this story in the UK Telegraph. It talks about a doctor who hears that the real reason for the abortion is because the unborn child is female. The customer then offers a different reason and then the doctor writes that reason down and agrees to do the abortion.

It seems to me that sex-selection abortion is perfectly legal in the UK. You just don’t tell the doctor what your real reason is, and they do the abortion anyway. It may sound good to pro-abortion people to be able to say that they oppose sex-selection abortions, but they really don’t. They know perfectly well that people who want sex-selection abortions can get them right away so long as they don’t tell the real reason why they want it. Even if the customer does tell the real reason, doctors can apparently work around it.