[knoppix2004]

Doctor: If you can’t heal them, kill them!

I don’t know how many of you are aware that Doctors in New Orleans were “murdering” their patients. Now, what most of you (who watches TV unlike me) heard that gangs were looting.

Yes what were they looting?

They were “looting” clothes, food, and medicine, and guns.

However, media put a spin on it, oh no, they were also talking iPod, and DVD, blah, blah, blah.

I am glade I don’t have a TV home, and that’s how I help environments. How about you?

That’s the best way of condemning Media and Entertainment industry.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... _id=361980
We had to kill our patients
by C AROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY, Mail on Sunday

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

'These people were going to die anyway'

The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.

"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.

"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."

Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."

My grand mother was in concentration camp, and during the end of a war, she was liberated from camp. However, she stayed there to help few Germans soldiers who were dying.

Doctors’ job is to save patients. My grandmother understood that. Anyone who defends these murders/terrorist doctors should be ashmed. You are not worthy of calling yourself human.

[smiley]

Well then I have a surprise for you. The doctors in the army are 'murdering' US soldiers too in Iraq.

It is standard practice in a crisis situation. You separate those who can be helped and those be cannot be helped. Those who cannot be helped you relieve from their pain by overdosing them on morphine. Look in a medical army handbook and you will find all the procedures.

There is no use in diverting resources from those who have an actual chance of survival to those who have none. It only leads to more death. And there is no use either in letting these people die in agony.

If you want to blame someone blame the government which wasn't able to supply medical care to its own citizens. Don't blame these brave doctors who probably had to make the toughest decisions in their lives.

After all they didn't have to stay there. They didn't have to work 50 hour shifts. They could have called it a day and left when their shift ended. In that case most of the people in the hospital would have been death. But hey, no one looks at the lives they actually saved. Drama and controversy make better headlines.

[Ebyss]

Also, it's becoming more and more common for people to use the word "terrorist" for people with whom they disagree. It's a dangerous habit. Nothing that these doctors did qualifies as terrorism, no matter how much you may disagree with their actions.

[Eli]

Also as it turns out it is really hard to murder an eighty six year old lady with conjestive heart failure and dementia that is on a vent.
Its true I looked it up.

Turns out we all die and turn to dust.

[aflurry]

kudos to your grandma. but it doesn't really seem like an equivalent situation to me.

[cornholio]

Doctors’ job is to save patients.

...And, when saving is not an option then maintaining comfort and dignity become the only reasonable goal.

Without knowing every detail I have to say my sympathy is with the doctor... Old, diseased, sick, suffering and dying people go to hospitals for help. When the hospital loses the ability to give even basic treatment (oxygen, breathing treatments, antibiotics, scheduled pain meds) let alone advanced treatment (ventilators, pressors, surgery) people are going to suffer and then die from their disease, and soon. So, the choice faced was a prolonged death suffering the pain, shortness of breath, and anxiety of their disease while abandonded in a dark, flooding portion of NewOrleans OR a comfortable, peaceful supervised death. If there was a third option it wasn't stated (and might have been preferable). In any case extreme circumstances often cut through moral posturing. I believe the physician may have done such things "in the interest of the patient, to prevent needless suffering." Ethically it is a slippery slope for the usual world, but with the choices as stated it would be a cop-out to not provide comfort/aid in the form of morphine (if that was all that was available) even if that sped an inevitable death. Personally I would hope to be given a lot of morphine (If I were the patient). Professionally would hope to never be in a situation that requires making that choice...

[cornholio]

Yes what were they looting?

They were “looting” clothes, food, and medicine, and guns.

However, media put a spin on it, oh no, they were also talking iPod, and DVD, blah, blah, blah.

http://www.jokaroo.com/extremevideos/ne ... video.html

[Liamj]

It is standard practice in a crisis situation. You separate those who can be helped and those be cannot be helped. Those who cannot be helped you relieve from their pain by overdosing them on morphine. Look in a medical army handbook and you will find all the procedures.

Triage i think they call it, a word we're all going to have to get used to. I have to think that those who can't countenance the idea under any situation must have lived very easy lives.

Triage is routinely practiced if only we could admit it. At the landscape scale here in Aus., some regions are let continue to decline via salinity, erosion etc, while are others are carefully selected for much more attention. Providing emergency medicine but not routine health care is itself a form of triage, as is saving whales and ignoring climate change (John Howards env. policy).

The idea that we do or should save everyone is a dangerous fantasy, it lets govt meddle in morality and religion in law, while privatised medicine loots citizens and/or the state.

[JeeBoomba]

My grand mother was in concentration camp, and during the end of a war, she was liberated from camp. However, she stayed there to help few Germans soldiers who were dying.

Doctors’ job is to save patients. My grandmother understood that. Anyone who defends these murders/terrorist doctors should be ashmed. You are not worthy of calling yourself human.

Good for your grandmother. These doctors were doing the exact same thing--helping those that could be helped, and giving a merciful, painless death to those that were going to die a slow agonizing death otherwise.
I'm failing to see the problem.

[Tyler_JC]

And would you rather allow these people to suffer horribly before dying?

Sometimes ethuanasia is necessary in order to prevent further harm.

[Eli]

Just wait. People will wish a doctor took mercy and gave them a dose of morphine before they die if the bird flu hits.


The bodies will have to be burnt in stacks if that flu hits.


This is really kind of dumb. Modern medicine does not work too well without power. And the people who were left to die would have died long ago in many nations of the world were even basic health care is hard to come by.

[I_Like_Plants]

The doctors and nurses were not sure if they'd get out alive themselves, it was a matter of saving who they could and giving the others a much more merciful death than they'd experience at the hands of the mob. Said mob out to torture and kill Ofays wherever they could find them. Wartime, people.

Should have called in Blackwater right away.

[CrudeAwakening]

If we do indeed face a future of restricted energy use, keeping alive the elderly, non-productive members of society will be one of the first things to go.

[shakespear1]

The doctors did what they could. Would it be better to leave someone old, unable to move and have them slowly drown? I had this experience myself and it is not a great way to go.

They did what they could so I wish the People would understand this if they have a brain cell that still works.

"I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution," he said.

In the corporate world where I work you get fired. I think in the military world you get court martialed. In the Bush World you just go on and on running the country into the ground. Amazing.

[I_Like_Plants]

Not so much drowning as being skinned alive by the mob. The doctors and nurses themselves were not sure they'd escape, saving what patients they could from the mob was sheer heroism.

[EnergySpin]

Misconception 1: The doctor's "mission" is not to save lives but to relieve suffering. Always has, and always will be .... "maintaining comfort and dignity" is actually the only reasonable goal/mission upon and everything else is a secondary goal.

Most of the posts were right on about the emotions of nurses/physicians that were forced to do those things but a few of the people that posted here have no fucking idea what it is like to :

- work 80+ hour weeks (it is 50 only in the UK due to the European Workhours Directive) , carrying on without sleep for 36 and 40 hours (as I'm sure my colleagues had to , down in NO) and
- being forced to take someone's life because the alternative would have been much worse. It puts one in the position of making a judgement/ decision that we physicians are explicitly told not to. It violates a core ethical principle of the medical profession: "autonomy". Calling them terrorists, or fascists is an insult.

Triage i think they call it, a word we're all going to have to get used to. I have to think that those who can't countenance the idea under any situation must have lived very easy lives.

Triage is routinely practiced if only we could admit it. . Providing emergency medicine but not routine health care is itself a form of triage, as is saving whales and ignoring climate change (John Howards env. policy).

The idea that we do or should save everyone is a dangerous fantasy, it lets govt meddle in morality and religion in law, while privatised medicine loots citizens and/or the state.

The decision between emergency and routine health care is not a form of triage. It is a form of stupidity that only undermines all health systems and sucks up resources without delivering.

Unfortunately for many people (including economists, eco-fascists, and eugenicists etc) the medical and the nursing profession is required to treat/save/heal everyone irrespective of color, ethnicity, age, capacity according to the patient's personal goals. How one can conclude that "saving everyone" (the term "save" should be properly defined, it has no bearing whatsoever with the mission of the various health professions) allows government and religion meddle with morality and law is beyond my comprehension. It also has nothing to do with privatized medicine ... ALL systems of medicine are predicated upon this ethical principle i.e. that everyone is medicine's job.
Triage does not exist from the viewpoint of the individual doctor/nurse; it only exists when they are embedded in the health care system.

Oh and medical military triage manuals actually advise: morphine to those that will not make it, ketamine to those who will (added for reasons of factul accuracy).

[cornholio]

Misconception 1: The doctor's "mission" is not to save lives but to relieve suffering. Always has, and always will be .... "maintaining comfort and dignity" is actually the only reasonable goal/mission upon and everything else is a secondary goal. .

In practice (in the US) saving lives at all costs is the default position... Without advanced directives stating differently it is assumed that everybody would want mechanical ventilation, CPR and even surgery if it might save their lives. Not performing life saving treatment (cpr, ventilation) requires the advanced reqeust of the patient that such treatments not be given, or if the patient has not left instructions for their care plan then permission from family to withold care. It is permissable for a individual physician to refuse to provide proceedures or treatment if they feel it is futile, but in practice this decision is a seldom used last resort (because surviving family sues)... Preferable is getting the patient or family to request agressive treatment be avoided in a futile situation so that they do not sue, and shifting to a "palliative care/comfort care" mode. A lot of time and resources are "wasted" fulfilling this standard for withholding care (90 year olds on ventilators unable to wean)... A "wealthy/wasteful/well funded" medical system can afford to accomidate this process and wait for consensus of family (irrespective of physician preference). But, as the system becomes poorer and more stressed wasteful use of resources on relatively futile care will have to be addressed. It will be interesting to see how this is done (rationing care) in the future...