Medicine

Liverpool Care Pathway Troubles Not “Scare Mongering”

The Liverpool Care Pathway was created to ensure that dying patients are treated properly in NHS hospitals. But it got caught up in centralized care dysfunction, with bureaucrats setting targets and suggestions for payment incentives, etc.. That led to some patients being subjected to check list medicine, in which they are dealt with as category [...]

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Death Panel Advocacy on This Week

Liberals screamed when Sarah Palin warned about “death panels” during the run up to the passage of Obamacare. But many really want health care rationing based on invidious methods of medical discrimination — as I have repeatedly reported here. I was just watching This Week and Steve Rattner — former adviser to Obama Treasury Dept. [...]

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Can Muslim Doctors Refuse to Treat the Opposite Sex?

Do medical professionals have a right not to perform services with which they disagree morally? If so, is that right absolute? If not, what are the parameters and what criteria should we utilize in deciding the question? Usually, the rights of medical conscience arise in the context of physicians not wanting to participate or be [...]

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Ovary Transplant Would Be “Consumerist” Medicine

Lately, I have been pondering the increasing use of medicinal means to achieve what are essentially non “medical” ends, by which I mean, using the knowledge of medicine to promote lifestyle agendas and fulfill what I am calling “consumerist” desires. I think this story fits that pattern: Doctors are proposing that women have sections of [...]

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All +50 Ordered to Take Statins?

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC We are individuals, not statistics. But don’t tell that to the healthcare technocrats, who are now strongly urging that the NHS give all people over 50 prescribed statin drugs to lower the risk of heart attack — even people who don’t have any apparent need [...]

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Should Dehydration Be the Default Decision for PVS?

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Bioethics exploded into the headlines over the last few weeks after the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article promoting “after-birth abortion,” that is, the right of parents to have infants killed if the child’s presence in life did not serve their (or society’s) interests. [...]

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Lawsuit Allowed For Death of Unborn Child

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC My head is spinning. The other day, we discussed the Portland case in which parents successfully sued doctors for wrongful birth, e.g., negligently performing prenatal tests so the parents didn’t abort their daughter child with Down syndrome. Now in Alabama, doctors can be sued for [...]

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Physicians Group Says Put Patients First

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Who does the doctor serve? When we lived in a society with common values, the answer was easy — the patient. Today, not so easy. Now, doctors sometimes are asked to take lives, not just save them. And there is a push within organized medicine [...]

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Pushing Centralized Control Over Which Patients Receive Life-Saving Treatment

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC The current medical resource crisis has placed people in extremis in the cross hairs of rationing or abandonment. We spend too much on end-of-life care, we are told. Often we pour money into treatment and the patient dies anyway, “wasting” the resources. Why pour good [...]

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Shameful State Care of Developmentally Disabled

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC The New York Times has a sickening story on how badly helpless and vulnerable people with develomental disabilities are treated in state care. (This is an issue I have seen first hand, once caring for a developmentally disabled man who was terribly abused while in [...]

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