The "protocol" for "terminal sedation" has been misued to kill people: but the protocol is actually guidelines to relieve severe pain: the problem is the physicians etc. want the patient to be dead.
( I might add: I was once accused of overdosing a dying patient who was moaning in pain and I had ordered doses of narcotics to be given until he was pain free...there is a small line here, but I should note that several patients who were given huge doses of sedation actually got better once the pain was relieved and the cause of their pain or infection was treated).
this would be kept quiet in the USA, but the UK papers have this about the Gosport scandal:
In 1991, Anita Tubbritt, a staff nurse working nights on an elderly ward at the Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire, asked to have a quiet word with her local union representative.
Mrs Tubbritt, along with a number of her colleagues, had become concerned over the way medical heroin was being administered to patients, who in their opinion did not require it.
On Wednesday, more than 27 years later, those concerns were finally acknowledged, when an independent inquiry concluded that more than 650 patients’ lives could have been prematurely ended by the “institutionalised regime” of prescribing and administering opioids without medical justification. In arriving at that conclusion, the Right...
that one is behind a pay wall, but here is the UKGuardian article about the scandal.
The independent report found that Dr Jane Barton, a GP working as a clinical assistant at the hospital, routinely overprescribed drugs for her patients in the 1990s.
consultants were aware of her actions but did not intervene. Nurses and pharmacists collaborated in administering high levels of drugs they would have known were not always appropriate.
Some senior nurses in 1991 tried to raise the alarm over using diamorphine – the medical name for heroin – for patients who were not in pain, administered through a syringe-driver pumping out doses that were not adjusted to each patient’s needs.
the whole issue of "assisted suicide" will not only encourage the depressed to think suicide is rational, but it will change the ethics of the medical profession to think that killing is okay, and hey, they will do it to "help" people.
“Handing over a loved one to a hospital, to doctors and nurses, is an act of trust and you take for granted that they will always do that which is best for the one you love,” Jones said in the introduction to the report.
“It represents a major crisis when you begin to doubt that the treatment they are being given is in their best interests. It further shatters your confidence when you summon up the courage to complain and then sense that you are being treated as some sort of ‘troublemaker’.
Right now, there is a level of mistrust by minorities against doctors, and this is going to make it a lot harder to practice medicine .
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