It’s not in the hospital - and at this point a hairdresser is just about as good as a Nobelist in Medicine.
A columnist for the Merc noted early on that this is all about guilt. Perhaps the mother will feel better if she is convinced she did everything she could to make up for her mistake in advocating for the surgery.
Voyager, I try to be compassionate too, but there are a lot of odd people out there, and they think even less clear when a loved one dies. How far do you want to go? How often do you want to make these exceptions? It seems to me leaving someone who is brain dead on life support for up to 48 hours is being pretty compassionate. I don’t know what the cost of this is (in terms of money out of government coffers, insurance checkbooks or the family’s wallets), emotional toll (to the families and care givers) and if this actually prevents care for others (I doubt it).
Bottom line is there are some eccentric folks out there, and if we open the door on this, I hate to see where the limit is.
especially for the charlatans that will prey on the emotionally weak - this hairdresser is selling snake oil at this point - and it will be expensive - and there is zero accountability on his side (nothing he does can make her ‘more dead’ nor will it ever make her ‘more alive’).
Ah, OK. I wasn’t sure about that.
Paranoid and irrational people are always going to freak out about something. It’s not worth worrying about.
Inserting a feeding tube may not be that expensive a procedure, but keeping a brain-dead body going in the ICU (or somewhere else) indefinitely sure is. It requires a specific mix of medications and other interventions to keep the blood pressure and temperature up and to prevent infection. The brain is not there anymore to send out hormones to tell each body system what it’s supposed to do and when, so medications are required to replace this lack. Even if the body is turned every 2 hours as per protocol, bed sores will likely develop and become infected.
Now that the body has been moved, who is doing all this complicated care? It can’t be done by a random bozo off the streets.
Apparently the family has a Go Fund Me account but that probably isn’t enough to finance everything that needs to be done.
Not to mention that it’s my understanding that her GI tract is no longer working correctly, and trying to give her nutrition through a feeding tube could just make things uglier than they already are.
I didn’t either. So call me an idiot too. No, go ahead, it happens to me all the time.
There’s probably a lot that is not making it into the press or into the court documents. Because of HIIPA we will never know what the doctors said or didn’t say to the family. But the biggest problem with tube feeding is probably:
From the court deposition, her digestive system is starting to fall apart. Even if it was intact, it’s not working. And even if it was working, there’s very little blood flow to it that could take nutrients away. It will do her less good that the IV feeding.
That’s the up side. Basically, her digestive system is now a bacterial incubator and if you add nutrients you’ll just increase the speed of deterioration, possibly explosively. If there are perforations in the system, the nutrients will be leaking out and fermenting against other organs. If the aim is to keep her looking alive as long as possible, this isn’t going to do it.
Exactly. The court is setting a dangerous precedent here, by inferring that a brain dead person is something other than fully dead (when in fact such a person meets every medical and legal definition of death). After the court-appointed neurologist confirmed the diagnosis of complete brain death, that should have ended it. The ventilator should have been shut off, and the body transferred to either the coroner or (if the coroner released the case) to whatever mortuary the family preferred. ENOUGH! There are limits to how far society at large is obligated to support an irrational person’s delusions (especially when that public is paying for them - those three weeks of futile ICU care were funded at public expense).
As for continuing to “treat” the corpse at private expense - anyone who donates to such a cause should be ashamed of themselves. What possible excuse can you give for financially contributing to delaying the decomposition of a dead body when there are so many other medical needs that go unmet?
We should focus our attentions on living people with real needs. Jahi McMath, regardless of what her parents believe, is not one of those people. She is dead. At this point, the only thing that will preserve her is taxidermy.
The report this morning said that they weren’t able to insert the feeding tube. They didn’t say why, but I suspect her body is collapsing to the point it is impossible. And the parents are finally giving up. So this won’t be going on too much longer, but it has gone on too long already.
As one of those opposed to opt-out organ donation no, I don’t think this is a case of a hospital acting like a vulture or really in any way relevant to organ donation as I see it.
Opposition to opt-out donation isn’t always because of religion, whackiness, denial, or other less than admirable reasons. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to view our citizens as a collection of spare parts that other people have some inherent claim to. I understand that you don’t understand opposition to something you see as so obviously good, but good ideas can have bad consequences when put into action.
For example, humoring a grieving family by treating a dead person. This seems like the kind of thing that’s going to happen again.
I hope so. As I’m sure you know, it’s front page news on the Merc every day, with a picture of the smiling teenager. Time for this sad tale to come to a conclusion. I hope the parents are able to grieve and move on with their lives.
Let me summarize my position, instead of responding to each person.
- The girl is dead, and was dead.
- The parents are irrational, and should have accepted reality and given up long before.
- The hospital is technically correct in not wanting to do any more procedures and just turn her body over to the coroner.
- We the people should not be paying for this.
- Despite all this, this has been a public relations disaster. The hospital, by sticking to their technically correct position, made it much worse.
I mentioned the Tylenol situation before. J&J was probably pretty damn sure that they were not responsible, but the case is considered a benchmark for how to do good crisis management because they didn’t try to stonewall on the facts and refused to recall the product.
If the hospital, while reiterating that the girl is dead, just did the procedures at the request of the parents, everyone would have saved a lot of time and money. Since the girl wouldn’t come back to life even then, it is not going to create a lot of copycat requests. If there was something unethical about the request, then I’d support the hospital’s refusal.
This is one of those cases where it doesn’t pay to be right - and insist on it. Any one who is married can think of many others.
To keep this on track, it seems to me that your concern that a dead person on a ventilator not be considered as just a collection of spare parts is not totally different from the parents concern that their daughter on a ventilator not be treated as a corpse.
Not you, but some people opposed to opt-out donation are concerned that it would give hospitals incentive to declare people with useful organs dead too quickly. Not a rational concern, sure, but since when has rationality been a factor in our debates?
No, my concern is not limited to dead people alone. Once you start giving people a claim on the organs of the newly deceased what prevents claims on the still living? There are several items one can give while still alive - blood, bone marrow, and kidney to name three - and the more routine these become the more pressure there is to give. I have been subjected to some pretty high-pressure tactics by people promoting a blood drive. I’m not sure which I found more offensive: when I was a regular donor and these ninnies didn’t understand I wasn’t coming to next week’s donor drive because I’d just given the week before and it was too soon, or the more recent ones who couldn’t comprehend, or thought I was lying, when I say I have been advised NOT to give any long and no, you are not entitled to know why. Yes, I do have a slippery slope concern here. No one should be compelled to donate their body parts to someone else.
While I, personally, don’t have that fear I do understand why some groups of people would have that fear. Where it’s based on historical abuses it is not entirely irrational. Discounting that shows a lack of historical knowledge of the dark and abusive side of medicine.
I just wanted to add:
Historically there has been a fear among Americans of African descent that doctors are too willing to give up on them*, reluctant to treat them**, or intent on using them as guinea pigs without their consent***. This is not entirely irrational because, historically, all of the above have actually been done to African-Americans. The family in question is of that ethnicity. I have to wonder if that fear, along with the ordinary denial of a parent confronted with the death of a child, is a factor here.
- Just consider that hospitals used to be segregated by race, meaning ill people of the “wrong” race in need of medical care simply wouldn’t be admitted to an institution reserved for a different skin color.
** See the numerous published articles on racial bias in medical personnel, too numerous to mention, but a quick Google turns up plenty.
*** In addition to the relatively well known Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, see also J. Marion Sims, who purchased female slaves pre-Civil War specifically for the purposes of experimenting on them to develop new gynecological surgical procedures.
This probably belongs in a separate thread.
Looks like the best thing for all concerned is an extended power failure.
I agree with you that this has been a public relations nightmare; I disagree with you that the hospital’s actions have anything to do with that. What you’re forgetting is that the hospital is constrained by privacy laws which limit what they can say to the process, while the parents are operating under no such constraints. They were free to spin the story, and did so. Blame an inept media for the public relations issues in this case, for poor reporting is what caused them.
At the cost of setting a dangerous long-term precedent. My God, if we can’t stop offering medical treatment to DEAD PEOPLE, who CAN we limit care on?
You don’t know that. Believe me, a lot of families have trouble coming to terms with the death of their family member, and the medical staff being firm about the facts of the case (while communicating in a compassionate manner) is one of the ways those families can be helped to move past the denial stage and begin the process of letting go.
Offering medical care to a dead patient is unethical. It provides no benefit to the patient, does not improve the patient’s prognosis, and can raise false hope in the patient’s family members.