12.9.05
New Orleans doctors and life and death
Thanks to having no other option, New Orleans doctors were forced to choose between abandoning their patients to a horrible, slow death and speeding along the process:
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
...
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
...
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right."
Read it all. The fact that the doctors were put in this dilemma was not their fault. But who will make the case that that it was not their fault, and that other people - high-ranked people who are not bound by Hippocrates Oath or any other moral or ethical guidelines - are to blame for this awful dilemma?
(Thanks to Left I for the link.)
Thanks to having no other option, New Orleans doctors were forced to choose between abandoning their patients to a horrible, slow death and speeding along the process:
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
...
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
...
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right."
Read it all. The fact that the doctors were put in this dilemma was not their fault. But who will make the case that that it was not their fault, and that other people - high-ranked people who are not bound by Hippocrates Oath or any other moral or ethical guidelines - are to blame for this awful dilemma?
(Thanks to Left I for the link.)
