Compassion and Choices has touted a commentary from a blogger named Cynthia Yokey extolling hospice that, unfortunately, also sends a highly misleading message about acute medical treatment. From the quote cited in the C and C blog entry:
In the acute care system, you continue to receive aggressive treatment to the end of life, regardless of side effects that may shorten your life or make life hard to endure, and when you die heroic measures are used to try to bring you back to life. (For example, CPR is a heroic measure. The EMT or nurse who performs CPR generally breaks the sternum and some ribs in the person receiving it — when the recipient is osteoporotic, all of the ribs may be broken. Survival rates after resuscitation are in the 1.4 to 5 percent range.)
Wait a minute: This just isn’t true. You can receive those services if you want–unless Futile Care Theory becomes the law of the land. But you can also say no to CPR via a do not resuscitate order (DNR) or any other form of extraordinary or ordinary medical interventions and still remain in acute care. Thus, this quoted paragraph leaves the materially false impression that if one chooses to remain in acute care, you have to receive all efforts to save your life–like it or not.
The people at Compassion and Choices know that isn’t true. If they were going to tout the blog entry, they should have corrected the record. I wonder why they didn’t?
June 13th, 2009 | 8:56 am
Well, gee, if they don’t think it’s wrong to kill people maybe telling lies doesn’t bother them either.
June 13th, 2009 | 11:13 pm
Everybody wants to rule the world, apparently. Which is scary, because nobody has ideas about perfection that mesh up too well with everyone else.
Boil down the Hindu Ten Disciplines and you get, “Don’t hate on or kill other human beings, and be friendly to one another.” Good basic standards.
When you start saying, “It’s okay to kill *some* people,” that’s when anarchy hits, because at some point you have to decide who falls into the “some people” category. And the people in that category may not agree that it’s okay for them to be killed, either…
June 14th, 2009 | 5:11 am
Have been following PJM for several years so caught that choice piece of propaganda the other day.. *IMMEDIATELY* smelled a euthanasia-promoting plant..
As things stand, I am fighting for my very Life under these circumstances because my cognitive faculties have been and are declining at a rate off the charts from average.. When even Harper says “I claim that families are encouraged to allow demented patients to die when treatments are available because doctors believe that the lives of demented have no value”, he’s telling me to be dead in not so many more years from now..
[Bleep] that [bleep]. ;)
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