UK govt agrees to investigate "death pathway"

Article below regarding abuse of the Liverpool Pathway, from Michael Cook of Bio Edge.

A problem also in the US and Canada.  See, for example, Kate Kelly's article about her mother and "VSED" by clicking here

With some doctors abusing the power they already have with the Liverpool Pathway, etc., why would you give them more power to effect patient death, i.e., by legalizing assisted suicide and/or euthanasia?

The problem will only get worse.

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http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10293
by Michael Cook | Oct 27, 2012 |

Pressure from the British media has forced an investigation into the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway by National Health Service and the Association of Palliative Medicine.

The medical establishment appears very reluctant to question the LCP. Only a few days ago 22 organisations signed a consensus statement supporting it. It quoted the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health, Earl Howe:

"The Liverpool Care Pathway has sometimes been accused of being a way of withholding treatment, including hydration and nutrition. That is not the case. It is used to prevent dying patients from having the distress of receiving treatment or tests that are not beneficial and that may in fact cause harm rather than good."

But the campaign by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph has been relentless. "When well over 100,000 are dying on the LCP each year, the suspicion inevitably arises that the pathway is being used to hasten death and free up beds," said the Daily Mail in an editorial.

Neurologist Patrick Pullicino contends that the LCP has made euthanasia a "standard way of dying on the NHS". He and his supporters were scathing about the consensus statement: 

"It is self-evident that stopping fluids whilst giving narcotics and sedatives hastens death... The median time to death on the Liverpool Care Pathway is now 29 hours. Statistics show that even patients with terminal cancer and a poor prognosis may survive months or more if not put on the LCP."

The investigation coordinated by the NHS will examine poor experiences under the LCP, which everyone acknowledges do happen. The NHS will talk to family members of people who have died on the pathway, investigate complaints and speak with clinicians. "Poor experiences must be explored, acknowledged and learnt from," says Professor Mayur Lakhani, Chair of the Dying Matters Coalition.

Will the investigation result in a thorough revision of the LCP? Even though the medical establishment admits that there are problems, it may not admit that they are due to the basic framework. The Consultant Nurses in Palliative Care Reference Group is already interpreting criticisms as dangerous and offensive. "Counter-productive comments", it says, are "deeply offensive to public servants who abide by clear codes of conduct and the law".

Kate Kelly on the "Liverpool Pathway"

If you think the "Liverpool Pathway" is painless, gentle, and/or dignified, think again. My mother had a mild stroke in a Canadian care facility. The relative with power of attorney, along with a doctor who had never seen my mother before, decided she would have morphine only, although she was conscious, trying to speak, and indicating she wanted water. She moaned for days, had blisters inside her mouth, had to be given suppositories to prevent convulsions, and clamped her lips on a dampened cloth, which provided only the illusion of moisture. After 6 days without food or water, she finally died.

 
We already have abuse of authority by some doctors. Assisted suicide will give them even more power. The push for suicide as a "cure" indicates a society gone mad.


To read my mother's story, see http://www.choiceillusion.org/p/vsed.html

Canada, Carter & Outrage!

"Canada will be known as the country where a Provincial Judge has more power than the Federal Government. "

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Dear Ms. Kerry-Lynne Findlay MP,

I am angry and upset about Justice Lynn Smith's decision in the Carter case, giving Ms. Carter the "right" to assisted suicide/euthanasia. 

This erroneous and presumptuous decision by Justice Smith is a guarantee of elder abuse unto death. We already have a problem with elder abuse in Canada. I witnessed this firsthand with my mother, when, after a mild stroke, the relative holding power of attorney decided my mother would have no treatment. I sat by my mother's bedside in a Nova Scotia nursing home, unable to do anything except hold her hand while she suffered for six days, before finally succumbing to dehydration and starvation. If Justice Smith's decision is allowed to stand, there will be no need for inconvenienced or greedy relatives to wait for even this questionable medical procedure of withholding treatment.

It appears that Justice Smith holds herself above the Government of Canada. She has given our elected representatives, such as yourself, a year to comply with her decision to allow people to "help" kill other Canadians. This is the right to commit homicide. The Federal Government of Canada decided many years ago that Canada would not kill convicted murderers, even if they want to die, but now Justice Smith had deemed that anyone in Canada can kill another person who allegedly asks to be killed. 

MP Findlay, the "right" to kill someone is not a decision for a Provincial Court Justice to make. If Justice Smith's decision is upheld, Canada will be a place of supreme irony. We will have the distinction of protecting the lives of convicted murders, while allowing our vulnerable elders and others to be subject to human error or deliberate murder. We will also be, I believe, unique as a nation: Canada will be known as the country where a Provincial Judge has more power than the Federal Government. 

I look forward to your response on this matter.

Thank you.

Yours truly,

Kate Kelly, B.A., B. Ed.

VSED: Legal Complaint Alleges that Heirs Manipulated Doctors to Kill Father

Grim Complaint Against Kaiser Hospital

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/02/06/43641.htm

By WILLIAM DOTINGA 

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (CN) - A son claims a Kaiser hospital ignored his wealthy father's power of attorney so the plaintiff's greedy siblings could collect multimillion-dollar inheritances. 

Hector Noval sued Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and affiliates, a doctor and two social workers on behalf of his father, Victorino Noval, who died in May 2010 after a "terminal extubation." Noval says his father had been involuntarily admitted to Kaiser's intensive care unit for pneumonia on April 28, 2010, while suffering from early-stage of Parkinson's and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Before being hospitalized, Noval, 78, "lived in his own home, drove his own vehicle, and performed his own activities of daily living," according to the Superior Court complaint. "He was worth $60 million and had annual income of $3 million. He made investments and controlled his finances. He suffered from no neurological deficiencies. He did not have dementia or diminished capacity, He functioned independent of others. He was in no way nearing death, an irreversible coma, or a persistent vegetative state. Upon hospitalization, he only required temporary oxygen support while the pneumonia infection in his lungs cleared and he regained his strength. His condition was no more serious than that."

However, Hector Noval says, two of his sisters, Lourdes Frost and Tania Noval, told Kaiser doctors, "falsely and fraudulently," that their father had "'advanced' Parkinson's disease" and had been declining for 6 months before his hospitalization.

He claims that his siblings' false and fraudulent statements included "that he 'would not want to be hooked to a machine like a ventilator,' even if just temporarily, and that 'he had expressed this to [his] daughter both when he is well, and when not so well.' Frost and Noval told defendants that decedent 'would not [have] wanted to be resuscitated if he is to pass away ... he would want to die peacefully if that was to happen.' Each of these statements were untrue. Defendants performed no diligence into their veracity and accepted them as true."

Not Dead Yet on Final Exit Network & Hospice

http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2012/01/georgia-response-letters-to-op-ed-by.html

Georgia:  Response Letters to op-ed by Final Exit Network (FEN) President Wendell Stephenson

On January 7, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an op-ed by Wendell Stephenson, current president of the Final Exit Network (FEN).  "Ensuring death with dignity" is no longer freely available at the AJC site, but the same essay was published in December last year in the Metrowest Daily News and can still be read here.

It's the usual conflation of terminal illness with chronic illness, sensationalist language describing FEN members and supporters as victims of oppression, etc.  This blog will probably be revisiting Stephenson's piece in the near future.

In the meantime, his op-ed drew some strong reactions that were published in the letters section of the AJC on January 15.  There were three letters - the first one agreeing with Stephenson and the following letters  disagreeing with him.  The letters can all be found on this page.

The first of the two taking issue with Stephenson and his op-ed was written by Eleanor Smith, a long-time disability rights leader and activist who is the founder of Concrete Change, an international network whose goal is to make all new homes visitable.  Her letter:

Right-to-die argument blurs a key distinction

“Ensuring death with dignity” (Opinion, Jan. 7) blurs the distinction between the freedom to end one’s own life, which cannot be denied, and the freedom to have others end one’s life, which endangers the lives of people less valued by society.

The elderly couple referred to in this column chose to inform their assisted-living facility of their intention to starve themselves to death (which the administration, unsurprisingly, could not support). They could have chosen instead to check out of the institution for a short stay with their children. I suspect organizational (rather than personal) advice led to this public confrontation.

Older and/or disabled people can be expensive to support. It is reprehensible to select them as the population encouraged to die before their time — rather than supporting them to live and making them feel welcome in the world.


Eleanor Smith, Decatur

The next letter was from Jennifer Hale, executive director, the Georgia Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.  Her letter:

Final Exit leader’s essay ‘inherently misleading’

The piece by Wendell Stephenson of the Final Exit Network attempting to link the philosophy of hastened death and assisted suicide — or, as he terms it, “self-deliverance” — with the ideals of dignity at the end of life provided through state-licensed and federally certified hospice care providers is absolutely wrong, inherently misleading and seems mildly predatory from my perspective (“Ensuring death with dignity,” Opinion, Jan. 7).

At the Georgia Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, it is our mission to provide education, information and advocacy to the public and to providers of end-of-life care to raise awareness of the options available to every person and improve on the quality of that care. Nowhere on the Final Exit Network’s website could I find where there was any support for families.

The couple mentioned in this piece made a decision about how they wished to spend the end of their lives. Hospice did not help them make this decision and did not help them carry it out. Hospice helped them return to their family’s residence and provided them with physical and emotional support and ongoing bereavement care for the family.


Jennifer Hale, executive director, the Georgia Hospice and Palliative Care Organization

Hale's letter opens with a strong and harsh assessment of both Stephenson and the Final Exit Network.

It's too bad that her concluding words contain a glaring contradiction of her claim that hospice played no role in helping the couple in question "carry out" their death through starvation and dehydration.  When she says that hospice gave the couple "physical and emotional support," that means they facilitated the process - at least to the extent that they made the couple as comfortable as possible and as free from the more unpleasant sensations of starvation and dehydration as they could manage.  That is a lot of help.  Similarly, I have concerns that "ongoing bereavement care for the family" means helping everyone in the family feel OK with themselves for their own sanction and support of the couple's long suicide through starvation and dehydration.  That, too, is a lot of help.

Maybe Ms. Hale could take a second stab at clarifying what hospice is and is not.  Because this last couple of sentences didn't help me at all.  --Stephen Drake

The Emperor has no Clothes: "VSED"

Euthanasia proponents have a new campaign promoting starvation and dehydration.  VSED: "Voluntarily" stopping eating and drinking.  Below, Kate Kelly provides a real life example:  "I watched her suffer." 

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Mild stroke led to mother's forced starvation

By Kate Kelly

I watched an old woman die of hunger and thirst.  She had Alzheimer's, this old woman, and was child-like, trusting, vulnerable, with a child's delight at treats of chocolate and ice cream, and a child's fear and frustration when tired or ill.

I watched her die for six days and nights.

I watched her suffer, and I listened to the medical practitioners, to a son who legally decided her fate, and to an eldest daughter who advised him and told me that the old woman, my mother, was "comfortable," except when she was "in distress," at which times the nurses medicated her to make her "comfortable" again.

I watched the old woman develop ulcerations inside her mouth as she became more and more dehydrated; the caregivers assured me these were not painful.

Patient Wishes Opposed

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/132679923.html

I read with sadness the Oct. 21 article about Anne Rostecki, Alleged deprivation of senior probed, by Alexandra Paul.

My mother died in a similar situation. A mild stroke led to her involuntary starvation and dehydration in a Nova Scotia care facility.

There is now a push in Canada to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia as a supposed voluntary choice. But as evidenced by my mother's and Rostecki's cases, doctors now impose their wishes on patients without their consent.

Doctors cannot be trusted with the power they have. Legalizing assisted suicide or euthanasia would give them even more power to effect patient deaths. The idea that legalizing these practices will somehow give patients more autonomy and choice indicates a society gone mad.

KATE KELLY
Coral Harbour, Nunavut

The Emperor has No Clothes: "VSED"

Euthanasia proponents have a new campaign promoting starvation and dehydration.  VSED: "Voluntarily" stopping eating and drinking.  Below, Kate Kelly provides a real life example:  "I watched her suffer." 

______________________________________________

Mild stroke led to mother's forced starvation

By Kate Kelly

I watched an old woman die of hunger and thirst.  She had Alzheimer's, this old woman, and was child-like, trusting, vulnerable, with a child's delight at treats of chocolate and ice cream, and a child's fear and frustration when tired or ill.

I watched her die for six days and nights.

I watched her suffer, and I listened to the medical practitioners, to a son who legally decided her fate, and to an eldest daughter who advised him and told me that the old woman, my mother, was "comfortable," except when she was "in distress," at which times the nurses medicated her to make her "comfortable" again.

I watched the old woman develop ulcerations inside her mouth as she became more and more dehydrated; the caregivers assured me these were not painful.