It’s also the ‘fault’ (if there is any blame to assign) of the seniors themselves. Take some pics of people laying in bed with a tube feeding them straight into the stomach. Make sure to get the adult diapers the person has on in the pic. And find some with people on ventilators for good measure. Watch how fast the people walk away or tune out. So they make a bad decision and can not change their mind, it’s still their choice to deal with or their families from there on.
I’ve had more than one senior relative walk away when I describe those images and I’m asking “do you want everything done? A tube that feeds you? Diapers cuz you can’t get out of bed? Want to learn how the lifts that move a person from bed to gurney work for a shower? A machine that breathes for you?” I never make it to the last question cuz they grab their walkers and leave…being a nice polite type, I don’t chase after then.
Medicine is changing. Last year I landed in the hospital with gallbladder/pancreatitis and I wanted to go home and get the surgery later. They wanted to take my gallbladder out then. I suggested it was cookie cutter surgery and not a big deal and I got LECTURED that is still Major Surgery and while they still wanted to do it to me, I could have bad complications and even die.
You also deny the choice to people who are dying of nothing. That is, if there’s no terminal diagnosis, but they are weak, in pain, not eating well, and just sort of fading away. That happens a lot. When they get to a certain body weight, we call it Adult Failure to Thrive but, just recently, Medicare re-defined (or clarified, depending on who you talk to) that AFTT is not considered a primary diagnosis for home hospice care benefits. Rather, whatever disease is causing that failure to thrive should be documented. But sometimes, the doctor has no idea why.
I have a patient who lost more than half his body weight in 6 months. He’s weak as a kitten. He’s nearly 100 years old; his wife died a year ago. His kids are reconciled, although certainly not happy, to the notion that he’s lived a good life and ready to hang up his hat. 6 months ago, he was still working part time. Today, he can’t get to the toilet without assistance. Why? Because he has failure to thrive. Why? We have no idea. None of his known diagnoses explain it. He’s just wasting away. He wants to die, at home, before he starts to get bed sores and infections and is forced into moving because his money for a home caretaker runs out and he can’t leave anything to his son. How many tests should we subject this man - with a phobia of hospitals - to before we give up finding a label for it? Whatever it is - cancer, liver disease, kidney disease, whatever - he won’t consent to have it treated. So what is the goddam point of testing for it?
But he has no terminal diagnosis. So I can’t get him into home hospice care (which is not the topic of this thread, but affects me a lot, and this is how I found out about the “terminal diagnosis” phrase and what it really means) …even were he living in a “terminal diagnosis only” state, he’d be ineligible to apply to end his life soon and on his own terms.
Death panels are such an interesting rant. As if we don’t already have them. First we have them in the form of credit ratings, wealth and level of insurance. Then we have our doctors themselves limiting our access to care. As one medical ethicist said in a lecture I attended, (paraphrased), “We really shouldn’t say ‘We’ve done everything we could.’ Because it’s rarely true. Guy comes in in v-tach, we call a code, we give him drugs, we defibrillate, we beat on his chest, and nothing works. Then we go tell the family that we did all we could. Well, we didn’t give him a heart transplant. We didn’t even put him on bypass. We did all we thought appropriate.” Doctors quite often make “death panel” decisions in favor of allowing death already, simply by virtue of prescreening treatment options and not presenting every possible treatment for consideration.
I thought I would revive this thread in light of what was a truly gratifying landmark decision today by the Supreme Court of Canada which seems to support everything that I and many other folks here have been saying.
The decision in short:
[ul]
[li]People with grievous and irremediable medical conditions should have the right to ask a doctor to help them die.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]The ruling is not limited to those with a physical disability who require a physician’s assistance to end their lives.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Not only was the decision unanimous, but all nine justices share the writing credit on the ruling, an unusual action meant to signal particular institutional weight behind the decision.[/li][/ul]
Part of the rationale…
The full text of the decision ought to be interesting reading for the doubters.
Let someone you love develop an incredibly painful mental disease.
Allow to simmer for 40 years.
Come back and tell us why that person must still endure that pain.
I really can’t understand how anyone can be so damned certain of his right to tell others that ther decisions are not allowed.
I assume, then, that you’ve read the entire judgment and have a detailed rebuttal.
No, one of the primary bases of civilized society is the right of individual self-determination. Personal decisions being “not allowed” is entirely based on the degree to which they infringe the rights of others, and no more.
The interesting thing in the outcome of this case is that it was based on appeals of earlier cases in which the central theme was the terrible fear of victims of degenerative diseases that they could be forced into a living hell beyond their control because of short-sighted and simple-minded legalistic constraints against clearly justified euthanasia, of the kind that we do out of mercy, without a second thought, to a horse or a dog. Yet this mercy is disallowed for a human being, because of various religious nutcases and other dogmatists. This is what the Supreme Court of Canada, exercising a unanimous view of compassion, overturned as being unconscionable.
I have a painful and degenerative disease (osteoarthritis), for which I take narcotics.
Surgery is also available, should it progress in certain ways.
I am lucky in living in a time and place where this is controllable.
George Eastman (yes, the Kodak one) had lumbar spinal stenosis - a narrowing of the spinal canal through which the spinal cord runs. Modern therapy is mainly nibble-around-the-edges; even this did not exist in 1932.
On March 14, 1932, he killed himself with a gunshot to the heart.
All of you “you will live and suffer as God intended” morons are encouraged to develop that charming condition.
Then come back.
Of course, until assisted suicide is commonly available, the wise person will, when faced with the loss of mobility, kill themselves while they are still physically able to do so.
Words to remember:
LD50: the dosage of a drug at which 50% of the population will die. Unfortunately, it is rarely available for Human, and we don’t really scale up from either mice or rats.
And remember - that is 50% - not 100%
Medulla - the brain stem, located at the top of the spinal cord - at the bottom rear of the skull.
This controls heart and lungs and such. It’s why police snipers aim for the upper lip, not the forehead.
Lumbar spinal stenosis, bilateral impingements of the sacrum, impingements of both hips, osteoarthritis in both knees, chondrocalcinosis in both feet and it is moving into my hands.
Now what were you saying? [actually I have plans that if the familial parkinsons and alzheimers kick in I am offing myself. I already have a DNR and medical power of attorney on hand with things spelled out. I am not going to be maintained like that poor undead woman in Florida…]
TL;DR version: the right to life is nothing without the right to death. Anybody, at any time, should be able to end their own life.
For those people who say only suicide for terminally-ill patients makes sense, consider this analogy I used the last time this topic came up (I can’t find the last instance though):
This is an example of a person whose situation is not terminal, as far as he knows. He could still hope tomorrow he would be rescued, or that one of the anti-pain techniques will work. Nevertheless, I completely understand someone taking the pill in that situation, and see it as neither irrational nor immoral.
But what would those advocating an “only for the terminally ill” position say here?
I disagree. That’s like saying you have a right to hurt someone else at any time. Your right to commit physical violence, either towards others or yourself, should be limited.
I think the circumstances in which suicide would be the lesser of two evils (because I don’t find it “acceptable”, just sometimes the least bad alternative) are limited and rare. I don’t care for the blanket any time position because that I do think human life has an inherent value and don’t think it should be causally thrown away. I think other alternatives have to be exhausted before moving to killing people, particularly vulnerable people with either impaired judgement or impaired ability to defend themselves.
I especially do not want to see a situation where a “right” to die becomes a “duty” to die because society becomes too lazy to make an effort to fix a problem that’s fixable.
No, it’s not at all the same as the right to hurt other people. I thought you were going to go with “That’s like saying we all have the right to take whatever narcotics we want”, where we at least could have a debate (I would be in favour of that too, FTR).
The simple principle of having the right to do whatever you want provided it causes others no physical or material harm, and does not impinge upon others’ rights, underpins the legal systems of most developed countries.
And mental anguish, for the most part, does not come under physical or material harm. A person has the right, for example, to dump their partner of 20 years, and indeed to do so as cruelly as one likes. Not considered something that the law needs to get involved with.
So it would not be consistent for the legal system to declare that suicide should be illegal due solely to the upset it may cause others (and indeed, that’s not the usual argument given for why it is illegal).
How so? Killing other people is infringing on their rights. How does killing myself infringe on anybody else’s rights?
Why should your thoughts be relevant regarding my life? What should give you the right to decide (by supporting anti-euthanasia legislation, for instance) whether I should suffer more or not?
I’m amazed by the hubris of people who think they should have a say in such a dramatically important matter (living or dying). Especially knowing that those exact same people would be outraged if other people thought they should have a say in much less important matters like with whom they’re allowed to have sex, or whether or not they should carry a fetus to term.
No prob. I’m used to being misunderstood.