Now that the assisted suicide movement believes it has some winds in its sails, its pretense of being reasonable and measured is collapsing under the ideological zeal that drives the movement. Case in point: The head of Compassion and Choices, Barbara Coombs Lee, has written an outrageous piece in the Huffington Post, that libels health care providers as torturers. From her piece:
In this country we usually torture people before we allow them to die of whatever is killing them — cancer, emphysema, the multi-organ failure of diabetes or heart disease…Our medical-industrial complex follows a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death as is medically possible. Our broken system rewards that paradigm with fee-for-service payments.
Standard routine is to torture those in the process of dying by inflicting upon them a host of toxic chemicals, invasive machinery and painful surgeries. It’s the American way of dying — agonized and prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones.
What shameless and false demagoguery. The vast majority of people in this country do not die in ICU units. Hospitals aren’t prisons. Doctors aren’t torturing people, they are trying to treat them, which can be painful to be sure, but much effort is made to control painful and uncomfortable symptoms. Nobody ties people down and forces them to have chemotherapy, surgery, kidney dialysis, etc. Most people are desperate for these interventions–even when the doctor advises against because they are unlikely to do much good. Moreover, most care these days is not fee for service, it is managed care through the HMO system. Fee for service to physicians under Medicare is hardly a cornucopia, and in fact is being continually cut–including in the new health care plan.
But she isn’t just implying that physicians are torturers, she accuses them of being sadistic:
Oncologists entice their dying patients into bearing one more, experimental round of chemotherapy almost certain to intensify toxic symptoms without extending life. Surgeons repair the fractures and amputate the limbs of people clearly only a few weeks from death. The newest medical specialists, “hospital intensivists” deftly thread tubes into failing hearts and attach ventilators to decrepit lungs. Much of the pain they inflict does nothing but monitor the chemistry and pressures of internal crevices and gather the information necessary to thwart a body trying to shut itself down.
I know that Coombs Lee knows this isn’t true. She is well aware that Futile Care Theory is charging down the tracks, which is explicitly intended to prevent patients from receiving life-extending care when the bioethicists think the quality of their lives aren’t worth the money spent.
And then, shifting gears, she attacks health care costs at the end of life. Does she want assisted suicide as a cost saving? You know she does, but doesn’t say it. Does she want futile care legally imposed? That would appear to be true, but she doesn’t say it. She just tells readers to call Congress and urge reform to stop the financial bleeding. But she doesn’t really say what policy she would like to see enacted.
But the conclusion to her piece is just window dressing. Her purpose was to alienate people from their doctors and panic them into supporting assisted suicide, which ironically, would be provided by the same physician “sadists” she castigates. What a shameless piece of propaganda.
July 15th, 2009 | 5:59 pm
I am getting so discouraged about the direction our country is taking. I was one of the many who championed the case of Terry Shiavo, not because I believed that she would make a major recovery, but because all efforts seemed to be forcing only one end solution – death by starvation.
I will, of course, after feeling awfully down, pick myself up, and keep posting, writing the legislators and administrators, and steering talk with friends in that direction, so to plant the seeds now.
We all also need to add our prayers (I have been very bad about that since vacation started – there always seems to be time, until suddenly, it’s bedtime, and I can hardly keep my eyes open).
July 15th, 2009 | 7:09 pm
Wesley, I think you’re misreading her intent. Yes, she’s promoting assisted suicide; yes, she’s distorting the nature of modern medicine. But what I hear in her piece–the only thing that comes through really clearly–is that she’s afraid of doctors.
She calls the entire medical establishment “torturers”, which is ridiculously hyperbolic when applied to anyone short of Dr. Mengele. But she does it over and over: “In this country we usually torture people”, “medical torture”, “Standard routine is to torture”, “medical equipment manufacturers produce the instruments, devices and chemicals of torture”, and on and on. And she doesn’t restrict her accusation to individual doctors; she indicts oncologists, surgeons, hospital intensivists, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, indeed, the entire “medical-industrial complex”. She says outright that she thinks we have “a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death as is medically possible.” I can think of no better explanation for her intense hatred of modern medicine than fear, fear of “agonized and prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones.”
Contrast this with what she says she wants: A system “that pays for hospice care in the home as readily as it pays for intensive care in the hospital”. “What patients need”, she says, is “peaceful endings”. We all know that she really means assisted suicide. How could assisted suicide be more peaceful? It’s the antithesis of medical treatment, after all. But if you see medical treatment as torture, then by contrast assisted suicide must look divine.
And to me that’s quite sad. Before reading this article I had no opinion on Ms. Coombs Lee’s personal life, but now I pity her.
July 15th, 2009 | 8:35 pm
Kyle: If that were true, why trust doctors to help kill you? BCL is a nurse and a lawyer. She wrote Measure 16 that legalized assisted suicide whilst a managed care executive. She, I believe, supported a California euthanasia bill, but when that failed, fell back on restricting her advocacy (for now) to assisted suicide.
I have debated her: She is very smooth and plays effectively on the emotions of audience. But of late, she has been getting increasingly strident and irrational, at least in her writing–as in this piece.
July 15th, 2009 | 9:03 pm
Wesley, that’s a good point, one which I didn’t consider. Also seeming to argue against me is another aspect of the text which I didn’t notice before: She spends more time denouncing our medical system than she does denouncing doctors specifically. She spends four paragraphs condeming its “culture”, its “routine”, and the “medical-industrial complex”, but only one on doctors.
Might it be that, rather than being scared of doctors, she’s scared of medical treatment? Or perhaps scared of illness and incapacitation? The phrase “unable to hold or be held by loved ones” seems important to me–as a nurse, she has surely seen people so stricken that they were unable to do just that, and perhaps she fears it so much she thinks suicide would be preferable. Of course, I might be wrong–but it still seems to me that the motivating force of the whole article is some sort of fear, even if I can’t precisely determine what kind.
July 15th, 2009 | 9:12 pm
Kyle: I think she is a zealot, and I think she thinks this helps the cause. If she thought praising medical professionalism helped the cause, she would do that.
Now, I think she is mistaken about that. Her stridency went way over the line. But she has the media totally in the tank for the agenda, so that makes her task easier. Thanks, Kyle.
July 17th, 2009 | 9:55 pm
Good Grief. The diseases we are dying from as human beings is the torture. How strange it is that such claims as the article created about Doctors missed that bench mark. In fact most folks welcome the discomfort of certain drug regimes & procedures in the hope that they will get to a better life if if it is for a short time.
My mom had serious health issues from 8 years of age. She had been hit with Rheumatic fever and it affected her heart and valves.
http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec23/ch272/ch272h.html
She went through a lot but it was the doctors who got her through to her death 70 years later. Ditto my dad who had serious diabetic issues. He also went through a lot but both of them got to see their grand children graduate and felt every breath they took was worth the effort. This culture of death puts to much emphasis on physical issues and fails miserably in understanding that giving up on a patients will to live, is a dishonor to the medical professionals.
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