Sunday, October 27, 2013

Dr. Kenneth Stevens and Jeanette Hall in Quebec!


http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/physician-assisted-suicide-encourages-people-143000132.html

Physician-assisted suicide encourages people with years to live to throw away their lives: an Oregon cancer doctor and his patient tell their story and warn Quebecers
MONTREAL, Oct. 25, 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - The Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice presented a doctor and his patient from Oregon where assisted suicide is legal. 
Dr. Kenneth Stevens is a practicing cancer doctor with more than 40 years' experience. He is also a Professor Emeritus and a former Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology, Oregon Health & Sciences University,Portland, Oregon. He has treated thousands of patients with cancer. 
Jeanette Hall, Dr. Stevens' patient, is thrilled to be alive 13 years after he talked her out of "doing" Oregon's law, i.e., killing herself with a lethal dose of barbiturates. 

In 2000, Jeanette was diagnosed with cancer by another doctor and told that she had six months to a year to live. This was without treatment. The other doctor had referred her to Dr. Stevens for radiation and chemotherapy. Jeanette, however, had voted for Oregon's law. She had made a firm decision to go forward with Oregon's law instead.

Dr. Stevens did not believe in assisted suicide. He also believed that Jeanette's prospects for treatment were good. He convinced her to be treated instead of doing Oregon's law.

Dr. Stevens talked about how the mere existence of legal assisted suicide steered Jeanette Hall to suicide. He also talked about how financial incentives in Oregon's government health plan also steer patients to suicide. Dr. Stevens warned that if assisted suicide or euthanasia is legalized in Quebec, then the Quebec government health program could follow a similar pattern, that is, to pay for people to die, but not to live.

Dr. Paul Saba, a family physician and co-president of the Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice explained how Quebec's proposed euthanasia law would encourage people, including young adults with treatable conditions, to agree to euthanasia and throw away their lives. The Coalition's position against euthanasia is supported by the World Medical Association representing nine million physicians.

For additional information and references including videos visit coalitionmd.org.

SOURCE Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Canada's Carter Case: WE WON!!!!!!

EUTHANASIA PREVENTION COALITION APPLAUDS RULING OF BC APPEAL COURT ON ASSISTED SUICIDE
Media Release - TorontoThursday October 10, 2013 /CNW/
The BC Court of Appeal has struck down the decision by Justice Smith and upheld the current laws which protect Canadians from euthanasia and assisted suicide.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) intervened in the BC assisted suicide case in order to uphold the principles of Parliamentary sovereignty and basic human rights. EPC is pleased that the Court has followed the lead of Canadian Parliament, the Supreme Court of Canada, and of the majority of Parliaments and Supreme Courts around the world in finding that the prohibitions against assisted suicide represent an important protection against abuse of vulnerable people.

EPC legal counsel Hugh Scher states:
EPC is concerned about the safety, security and equality of people with disabilities and seniors, which is central to the protections set out under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and our Criminal Code. 
EPC-BC chair Dr. William Johnston states:
The debate is over whether what the suicidal person proposes – to kill themselves – is a goal which should be shared and facilitated by the state. I suggest there are alternate goals like the treatment of depression and other symptoms, to which the state should apply itself. When someone has lost hope for the future, finds no meaning in their life, and sees only one solution – death – we recognize a suicidal depression. That bleak tunnel vision should evoke suicide prevention, not euthanasia.
Disability rights advocate Amy Hasbrouck of Toujours Vivant - Not Dead Yet states:
People with disabilities, chronic illness and seniors are negatively affected by assisted suicide and euthanasia because it leads to the impression that our lives are lacking in meaning and value as compared to other Canadians.
EPC Executive Director, Alex Schadenberg states:
The evidence is clear that in jurisdictions where these practices have been legalized, there have been significant abuses of vulnerable people. For example, studies in Belgium demonstrate that 32% of people killed under the Belgian law were killed without consent and without their own request, in breach of a fundamental condition of that law. 
Not one of these doctors has been prosecuted.
In the event today's ruling is appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, EPC will seek to intervene with a view to protecting the dignity and equality of all Canadians, particularly those who are most vulnerable to the risks of abuse from assisted suicide.

Please consider a generous donation to help us cover expenses and to prepare for the next round.  Thank you for your support!  To donate,click here.

For further information, please contact:
Dr. William Johnston, (Vancouver) EPC-BC Chair: (604) 220-2042 –willjohnston@shaw.ca
Alex Schadenberg, (London) EPC Executive Director: (519) 851-1434 – info@epcc.ca
Amy Hasbrouck, (Montreal) Tourjours Vivant - Not Dead Yet: (450) 921-3057 – info@tv-ndy.ca

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Cherelle Samuel: They Drugged My Grandmother and Fed Us Lies

Edited by Margaret Dore, click here to view original

From beginning to end my grandma was a fighter who was battling stage IV stomach cancer and was given 6 months to live back in January she outlived their time table, but the story doesn't end with a closed book.

I moved in with her in March this year and was with her every step of the way so my final decision came from what I thought was from the heart.  We had a few good months where we would go out and she would go to gamble. She always kept a smile on her face up until the last few days we had with her.

Friday, September 27, 2013

A Chilling Prospect for Disabled People


As posted by Not Dead Yet

        Stephen Hawking has expressed the view, in the course of a BBC interview, that people “who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life”. They do, of course, have that right now:       ending your own life isn’t a criminal offence. What Professor Hawking means, presumably, is that the law should be changed to legalise what is being euphemistically called ‘assisted dying’ – or, to put it another way, that doctors should   be licensed to supply lethal drugs to terminally ill people to help them commit suicide.
There is, in fact, a Private Member’s bill, in the name of Lord Falconer, before the House of Lords at this moment proposing just that. Professor Hawking believes that “there must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurised into it”. This is a fair enough caution to sound. What is remarkable, however, is that Lord Falconer’s ‘assisted dying’ bill does not contain any specific safeguards to ensure that these and other conditions are met.

Professor Hawking states that “human beings should not be allowed to suffer any more than animals”. This is a well-worn argument of the euthanasia lobby – that we put down suffering animals out of kindness, so why don’t we do the same for humans? But what those who use this argument seem to overlook is that people don’t always take their pets to be put down out of compassion: they sometimes do so because they are a nuisance or because they are proving expensive to treat or to feed. Is that the sort of society we want to see?

Those of us with disabilities are all too familiar with the view that many in society take of us – that they wouldn’t want to live with our limitations and that our lives are less worth living than the lives of others. I myself have encountered such attitudes: I have been told that ‘people like me’ do ‘a good job’, I have had it put to me by a medic that I should not have children and I have even been patted on the head by a colleague. The Paralympics, in which I have had the opportunity to participate, is sadly an all too rare occasion in which people with disabilities are valued.

Legalising ‘assisted dying’ for terminally ill people illness reinforces prejudices about people with disabilities. Terminal illness and physical disability aren’t, of course, the same thing – many people with disabilities aren’t terminally ill. But terminal illness can often bring with it disability of one kind or another and it’s not a big step in popular perceptions to see the two as in some way linked.

That’s why the majority of people with disabilities, including me, are afraid of a law that would offer a lesser standard of protection to seriously ill people than to others. Anyone who is inclined to discount such fears should read the report of Lord Falconer’s self-styled ‘commission on assisted dying’: it is on the recommendations of this unofficial and self-appointed group that his Private Member’s bill rests. Their report recommends that physician-assisted suicide should not be offered to people with disabilities who are not terminally ill “at this point in time“. It is those italicised words that send a chill down the spine of many people with physical disabilities. Lord Falconer’s ‘assisted dying’ bill may be well-intended. But it risks becoming a law to cater for the strong rather than to protect the weak.

Monday, September 2, 2013

POLST: What is it and why should you oppose it?

By Julie Grimstad

The POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) form is a standard document that, when signed by a designated healthcare professional, dictates whether to withhold or administer certain forms of medical treatment and/or care. POLST is known by different acronyms in various states (MOST, MOLST, POST, etc.). 

A brightly colored form that is very visible in a patient's medical chart, POLST has boxes to check off indicating that a patient does or does not want cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), antibiotics, nutrition and hydration, etc. Trained "facilitators"—usually not physicians—discuss treatment options with patients. After filling out the form with a patient, the facilitator presents it to be signed by a designated healthcare professional—someone who may never have seen or talked to the patient. The completed POLST form is not simply an expression of a patient’s treatment preferences; it is a set of physician's orders which must be followed.

POLST medical orders travel with the patient from one healthcare setting to the next and even home to be followed by EMT's in the event of a medical emergency. The first order in many POLST-type forms is "FIRST follow these orders, THEN contact Physician, Advanced Practice Nurse, or Physician Assistant for further orders if indicated."[i]

POLST is tilted toward non-treatment and can encourage premature withdrawal of treatment from patients who, but for the denial of treatment, would not die. Facilitators present options for treatment as if they are morally neutral, even though certain decisions may lead to euthanasia by omission. Groups that promote euthanasia and assisted suicide, such as Compassion & Choices (formed by the merger of Compassion in Dying—a Hemlock Society spin-off—and End of Life Choices), strongly endorse POLST. This is a big RED FLAG.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Judge upholds count of assisted suicide

http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20130802_Judge_upholds_count_of_assisted_suicide.html#hLRSrC4PBjvmaCti.99

POTTSVILLE, Pa. - A judge on Thursday upheld charges against a Philadelphia woman accused of helping her 93-year-old father commit suicide through a morphine overdose at his home here, where he was in hospice.

Prosecutors in Schuylkill County charged Barbara Mancini, 57, with aiding suicide. The judge refused to drop the charges after a preliminary hearing.

Pottsville police say Mancini handed Joseph Yourshaw a bottle of liquid morphine at his home in February, leading to his death four days later. The death certificate, which listed the immediate cause as "morphine toxicity" that complicated high blood pressure and heart disease, was issued in June.

Mancini, who was trained as a nurse, remains free on bail. Her lawyer could not be reached for comment Thursday evening. The local district attorney's office asked the state to prosecute the case due to a conflict of interest.

An end-of-life advocacy group called for the charges to be dropped, saying the U.S. Supreme Court allows dying patients to receive adequate pain relief, even if it hastens their death. "Attorney General [Kathleen] Kane should leave Barbara and her family alone so they can grieve over their loss," Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Denver-based Compassion and Choices, said in a statement.*

*Compassion & Choices is the former Hemlock Society.  To learn more about C & C, read:  and Theresa Schrempp, Esq.,  "Compassion & Choices is a Successor to the Hemlock Society" and Senator Jennifer Fielder on Compassion & Choices: "Beware of Vultures." 

Or, go to these links:  http://www.montanansagainstassistedsuicide.org/2012/12/compassion-choices-is-successor.html and http://www.montanansagainstassistedsuicide.org/2013/06/beware-of-vultures-senator-jennifer.html