Man with Disabilities "Not Worth Saving"
Labels: Human Exceptionalism. Bigotry Against People with Disabilites.
The next time you are tempted to scoff at folk with disabilities who worry that they many people think their lives are not worth living, remember this story. Two medical technicians from the UK have been arrested for allegedly deciding that the life of a man with disabilities wasn't "worth saving" from a heart attack. From the story:It is alleged that staff in the control centre heard the two medics making disparaging comments about the state of the house.
A police source, who asked not to be named, said that the ambulancemen were then heard discussing Mr Baker and saying "words to the effect that he was not worth saving". The source said that the two men were allegedly first heard commenting on the untidy state of the house and then saying that it was not worth bothering to resuscitate Mr Baker. They are said to have discussed what to tell ambulance control and decided to say that Mr Baker was already dead when they got there.
Human exceptionalism demands that each of us be deemed to be of equal objective moral worth. It is an ideal we have never achieved, admittedly. But unless bigotry against people with disabilities is especially shocking when it impacts care in the medical context.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:42 AM
26 Comments
26 Comments:
This story is heinous!
I don't even know what else to say except there is a group think of "kool-aid" drinkers and it's becoming more and more common to think like this.
Again, thank you for your voice. (even though it may feel like you're in the wilderness)
Have a Happy and safe New Year!
Why aren't they in jail? Along with a lot of other people.
Sorry, missed that part. But a lot of other people should be too; they aren't the only ones, as SHS has just pointed out.
It is disappointing that people can treat others who have disabilities like this. I think they have the idea in their heads that if you can't produce or participate in a way to their liking then you are not worth anything.
I agree with Secular Heretic. I think also that it's partly just an animal brute dominance dynamic at work, and that we overestimate the "humanity" we regard ourselves as having by virtue of thinking of ourselves as "civilized" when in fact we have the same instincts as predator animals (which we are ourselves) that cull the weak. Look how people behave toward each other even when "each other" are not disabled. "Nice" is the paramount value these days, and we want to think we are (everyone will castigate us if we're not), but look at the way many of us often behave. Those who are not fully humane and compassionate are "nicer" to those who are in some way dominant over them (richer, better looking, better dressed, more accomplished, higher on the social or professional ladder, in a position to give them something they want, etc.), whom they have reason to fear in some way, whom they regard as their peers, or to whom they feel they have an obligation of some kind. People who are not humane feel entitled as "the superior specimen" to push creatures weaker than ourselves around, even when we don't need to hunt them for food as one non-human animal does another. (This is yet another reason why animal experimentation, and justifying it on the basis that we are the superior species, is a bad idea. Those who are vulnerable in any way may (may) awaken on a subliminal level fear of being or becoming likewise, which would also result in a "better you than me" "lifeboat ethic," attitude and desire to get rid of the person who arouses such fear and anxiety.
Nevertheless, I find it astounding that more often than not, people fail to consider that at any moment, they themselves could become disabled and vulnerable to such treatment themselves, and that, if they are lucky, one day they will be old, and would not want to be treated that way. They are so self-centered, so dumb, and so lacking in the capacity for empathy that they don't make the connection. I've seen it in the course of trying to look out for an elderly parent. The mindset is that the geriatric person is supposed to die, that it is a "waste" of a younger person's time to tend to them, that the geriatric no longer has rights, or even sensibilities, that they are worthless and just don't matter, that they have a lot of nerve "wanting to hold on," etc. Once someone is weak in any way, all hell breaks loose in terms of others' attitude toward them.
I've seen what SHS mentioned here in a hospital setting, re a geriatric, and it is even worse than anyone who hasn't seen it can imagine.
This is a horrible story. I'm trying to figure out how these guys decide if somebody is, in their enlightened view, "worth saving." I mean, do you have to live in a mansion? What if you don't walk with sticks but keep your house neat, is that okay, then? These are creepy people.
From what I've seen, quite a few people in hospitals, and otherwise employed and presenting themselves as those purporting to "help," are, and they victimize the helpless and vulnerable. Wherever the helpless and vulnerable are, there are sadists and creeps.
And being in a medical setting, belonging to a helping profession, etc. gives them credibility and cover.
What's frustrating is that this stuff goes on all the time, undocumented, unrectified. Note to "NICE": STOP IT NOW!!!! Kudos to the emergency operators who reported what they heard from the other end of the line
Lydia's comment about hypothetical criteria got me thinking. It doesn't matter if a person does live in what everyone in town refers to a mansion, is so well known as an accomplished person that they are front-page news, doesn't walk with sticks, and even in their 90s cleans up after the cleaning lady and can still do just about everything they could in their 40s, only better; that was the situation of the person I tried to save from a hospital, the "guardians" it got a court to put in place to pull the plug on her and the Catholic diocese under whose auspices it operates, and courts that validated her being put to death against her actual wishes -- none of whom even knew her, and who all had their own agendas. Those in positions of power over a disabled, ill, geriatric, or otherwise vulnerable person, no matter who that person is, and who don't even know the person, are able to make them dead, and it happens with terrifying regularity. That anyone, in a civilized society, in peacetime, yet, would even be willing to make a decision about whether another person, who has not even been charged with a capital crime, lives or dies is in itself terrifying, but once society has given a green light via legal sanction for some, including even medical personnel to do it, others feel entitled to follow suit even without legal sanction, and do. Barbarianism has taken hold, and these two barbarians acted in the same barbaric atmosphere that the U.K.'s Lady Warnock, who ought to have been arrested and convicted immediately for incendiary hate speech, is promoting. Some who draw salaries for jobs in which they are supposed to help the vulnerable feel superior to those they are supposed to be serving and get full of themselves and drunk with power and feel entitled to be judgemental; how dare this victim not have made sure that his housekeeping met with their approval; how dare he have insulted them by not having shown them the respect of cleaning house in their honor; he should be grateful to them and show them such respect; they have the expertise he needs and the authority to enter his home without being considered intruders, not vice-versa; they felt entitled not only to decide that he should die, but to lie about it. Laziness, incompetence, dishonesty, a sense of overweening entitlement, and arrogance all go together. I wonder if they ever had lifted anything from other premises they had the legal right, which their ilk construe as authority, to enter for the purpose of helping the owner, and were annoyed that the pickings in this place didn't look good. There's a saying that if one can lie, one can steal, and that if one can steal, one can kill. Those willing to do wrong don't care who the victim is, and rationalize that the victim "deserves" the consequences of their actions, because they are too old to continue living, "asked for it," haven't cleaned house lately, or whyever. We don't entirely think of rights as inherent; we have relegated them to matters of law; we speak of "having," "asserting," "exercising," "fighting for," "defending," "preserving," "protecting," "maintaining," etc. our rights; when one is in no position to assert or exercise one's rights, those whom we should be most able to trust to act ethically acknowledge and respect them instead violate them. Having absolute control over another person when that person is helpless leads some to feel that they have absolute authority over them, and those who cannot be trusted to respect the distinction will do the same to anyone. In the impeccable mansion of an old person whom they found alone, they would have made the same decision on the basis of the victim's advanced age. People either have character or they don't.
"If you don't meet our standards, you should die" and "our interests are more important than your life" now is the rule in at least one hospital, with families who don't want to be burdened, with the "quality of life" shibboleth and the death culture in general, etc.; if this wasn't utilitarianism at work, I don't know what would be. I wonder how the criminal case will work out. I also wonder how Lady Warnock would like it if they came to assist her after she'd fallen and hit her head in a drunken stupor, or overdosed, once too often and they decided that she was a hopeless addict. I'm not saying she has a substance abuse problem (interesting words, come to think of it, considering her disrespect for life and the prevalence of that problem concurrent with the death culture; everybody wants to escape...), but one does wonder how else anyone could become as out of bounds as she and the rest of her ilk. And she's titled -- just what the world needs, someone with a title touting a deadly agenda.
I just figured out something else about the death culture. People keep telling me not to let my spirit be broken by what happened to someone whose life I tried and was unable in the end to save. The agenda I was fighting obviously had the intention of breaking the spirit of the patient and obstructing and doing likewise to the person fighting for them. Absolutely ugly it is to try to force someone to give in to death and obstruct someone fighting for a life; who is willing to destroy one is willing to destroy another, and such are lower than pond scum, of which there seems to be a lot around. I kept wondering why the families of other victims weren't speaking up. I'm tired of hearing from people that I was "up against too much," that no matter what I'd done I couldn't have stopped it, and that "it's impossible to beat the system," and I'll never forgive certain people for giving in about what was going on. But my point here is that the more people are broken over this kind of thing, the more it goes on, the more people give in, and the energy of it snowballs, with the resulting in what SAFEpres noted is commonplace, people wanting assisted suicide, etc. Does anyone remember that stupid movie with Richard Dryfuss and he was a sculptor with a loft in Boston I think and had a girlfriend who was a dancer and he got in an accident and ended up as a quadriplegic, it was a play before it was a movie? Was it called something like Whose Life Is It Anyway? Was that when this "quality of life" syndrome started as a matter of public discussion and point of view? Does anyone remember who wrote the play? Didn't he get his wish to have his life ended at the end of the movie? Was what happened in the plot outcome even legal then? It just didn't ring right. I remember when a president's son told the press that his mother, a trendsetter if ever there was one, had died on her own terms. Glamorization and acceptance by the intelligentsia seems to have kicked off the trend and lent credibility to the notion of such things happening with impunity.
I just figured out something else about the death culture. People keep telling me not to let my spirit be broken by what happened to someone whose life I tried and was unable in the end to save. The agenda I was fighting obviously had the intention of breaking the spirit of the patient and obstructing and doing likewise to the person fighting for them. Absolutely ugly it is to try to force someone to give in to death and obstruct someone fighting for a life; who is willing to destroy one is willing to destroy another, and such are lower than pond scum, of which there seems to be a lot around. I kept wondering why the families of other victims weren't speaking up. I'm tired of hearing from people that I was "up against too much," that no matter what I'd done I couldn't have stopped it, and that "it's impossible to beat the system," and I'll never forgive certain people for giving in about what was going on. But my point here is that the more people are broken over this kind of thing, the more it goes on, the more people give in, and the energy of it snowballs, with the resulting in what SAFEpres noted is commonplace, people wanting assisted suicide, etc. Does anyone remember that stupid movie with Richard Dryfuss and he was a sculptor with a loft in Boston I think and had a girlfriend who was a dancer and he got in an accident and ended up as a quadriplegic, it was a play before it was a movie? Was it called something like Whose Life Is It Anyway? Was that when this "quality of life" syndrome started as a matter of public discussion and point of view? Does anyone remember who wrote the play? Didn't he get his wish to have his life ended at the end of the movie? Was what happened in the plot outcome even legal then? It just didn't ring right. I remember when a president's son told the press that his mother, a trendsetter if ever there was one, had died on her own terms. Glamorization and acceptance by the intelligentsia seems to have kicked off the trend and lent credibility to the notion of such things happening with impunity.
I just figured out something else about the death culture. People keep telling me not to let my spirit be broken by what happened to someone whose life I tried and was unable in the end to save. The agenda I was fighting obviously had the intention of breaking the spirit of the patient and obstructing and doing likewise to the person fighting for them. Absolutely ugly it is to try to force someone to give in to death and obstruct someone fighting for a life; who is willing to destroy one is willing to destroy another, and such are lower than pond scum, of which there seems to be a lot around. I kept wondering why the families of other victims weren't speaking up. I'm tired of hearing from people that I was "up against too much," that no matter what I'd done I couldn't have stopped it, and that "it's impossible to beat the system," and I'll never forgive certain people for giving in about what was going on. But my point here is that the more people are broken over this kind of thing, the more it goes on, the more people give in, and the energy of it snowballs, with the resulting in what SAFEpres noted is commonplace, people wanting assisted suicide, etc. Does anyone remember that stupid movie with Richard Dryfuss and he was a sculptor with a loft in Boston I think and had a girlfriend who was a dancer and he got in an accident and ended up as a quadriplegic, it was a play before it was a movie? Was it called something like Whose Life Is It Anyway? Was that when this "quality of life" syndrome started as a matter of public discussion and point of view? Does anyone remember who wrote the play? Didn't he get his wish to have his life ended at the end of the movie? Was what happened in the plot outcome even legal then? It just didn't ring right. I remember when a president's son told the press that his mother, a trendsetter if ever there was one, had died on her own terms. Glamorization and acceptance by the intelligentsia seems to have kicked off the trend and lent credibility to the notion of such things happening with impunity.
I apologize for the repetition above; my computer error.
This story reaffirms what I as a paralyzed man already know: my existence is not valued. Simply put I fear MDs and the medical establishment that too often denies my humanity. My experiences with the health care profession in recent years has been overwhelmingly negative. In a medical setting people with disabilities are perceived to be costly burdens whose life is hopelessly compromised. I am a non entity, an afront to the limits of modern medicine and an ever present reminder of what can go wrong. It is no surprise to me that people with a disability needless die while others live.
Peace: Your existence is valued. There is something wrong with THEM.
I saw how they are with the elderly, and obviously they are the same with the disabled. My mother's doctor ignored her complaints, acted in a bizarre manner that confounded those doing their jobs in caring for her, and left her saying, "He just thinks I'm old and that I should die." In fact, when she asked him, after recovering from a heart attack at 91, "What about your longevity," he said, "You've had your longevity." My 102-year-old aunt was asked by her doctor some years ago, "How long do you expect to live, anyway." Both were emotionally devastated for years afterward by their doctors' attitudes. She left hospital a day early, after only two days, after her heart attack, and insisted on someone driving her to the 24-hour vet where she could visit the cat, who was already in hospital, and when I brought her to an emergency room at the right time for treatment that the e.r. said would required a stay of only two days, it was well nigh impossible to get her to stay the first night, and absolutely impossible to get her to stay the second day; getting her to return to hospital required a long ordeal and arranging string of callers visitors urging her to go; no sooner was she there than the hospital's agenda was that she should be "made," against her own wishes, DNR, and as she continued to survive, it took the court tack that led to her being denied treatment or the opportunity to leave the hospital and go to another facility where she might get what she needed. When, months into this, I told a nurse how she had not wanted to come to the hospital, the nurse said to me, "And now you know why." I fully understand what she feared now; it happened. Those who are not old or disabled do not know what the elderly, the disabled, and those who work with honesty, dedication, frustration, and heartbreak in hospitals, and are helpless against hospital administrations and doctors and have to see their work undone and the Hippocratic Oath violated all day, every day, do know. The medical establishment rides on the perception of the younger and more able-bodied "mainstream" of society that doctors and hospitals know best and do their job honestly and with respect for all life, when in fact that is not true. This cannot go on, and when enough people speak up, it will stop.
When a situation exists that causes anyone to say that they fear doctors, something not only very wrong, but also illegal, is going on. Yet it exists. That means that our entire society is lost.
How often does law enforcement address what happens here? How much litigation is there? I can't find the body of work on the litigation that ought to exist.
"What about my longevity?"/"You've had your longevity" says it all. Where do they get off saying how long someone should live, that someone should or should not live, etc.? What makes them so sure of their prognoses in the first place?
They seem to be taught in medical school that life is a terminal disease, and they focus on age as something leading to that end; I remember being told by a doctor once, "What do you expect? You're 28!" Their focus is more on loss of vitality than on preservation of it.
Their arrogance is out of control. My uncle, who was trained at Johns Hopkins in the 1930s-40s, used to say like a parrot, "Do no harm! Do no harm!" but also often told the story of one of his medical school professor who taught his students to deliver babies by appointment for the sake of their own convenience. I grew up with a now-doctor who always said he wanted to be a pediatrician, but when it came time to choose a specialty decided on ophthamology because he did not want to get calls in the middle of the night. It's a demanding profession and they are only human, but our society, and medical school, teach them to think of themselves as little gods and to put their own priorities first. Then they are let loose on use.
Following, of course, training that includes experimentation on helpless non-human animals, which is part and parcel of medicine and science, engraining in them callousness and further arrogance. And then they are let loose on us. Those animals fear doctors and the medical establishment, just as humans now do. This is why, SHS, the "benefits" of animal experimentation to humans do not outweigh its detriments; if they did, we would not have the death culture. Getting to the point where we can keep people alive longer does no good when those who "brought us" the "advances" now feel entitled to end our lives at their whim (they don't call it whim, of course; they cloak themselves in their "superior knowledge"); they even justify it by utilitarian reference to the "best use of resources" -- the same resources that lengthen the lives they feel entitled to cut short as a result. Many end up needing the technology, e.g. on life support, from what I've seen, only as a result of the same negligence that is the result of the medical establishment's arrogance. It goes in a circle and it's moving us more backwards than forward.
As long as animal research is considered "essential" and is an integral part of "medical progress," the medical establishment is going to discard human lives with the same arrogance, casualness, and sense of absolute entitlement as it does non-human ones. You can't have one without the other. I know that SHS would like to keep animal experimentation and add humanity, but it doesn't, and can't, work that way; it's unrealistic and impossibly idealistic, as well as illogical; it's trying to have one's cake and eat it too. And when we look back to when medicine started to go down the tubes in terms of ethics, it goes back to the Nuremberg Code's requirement that testing be done on non-human animals, which made things not better, but worse. Yes what it purportedly was trying to end and prevent was wrong, but two wrongs don't make a right. Now medicine has stopped being a profession and turned into a business, doctors have abandoned their oath, and we have to fear doctors and the medical establishment. Very nice.
Lanthe, Your lengthy comments are thought provoking. I agree the problem I have as a paralyzed person accessing health care does not stem from sort of inner fault of mine. The problem is indeed social. Fear of MDs is not uncommon among those with disabilities. We do have the luxury of complaining about routine illnesses. The majority of disabled people have no health insurance and even if they do encounter a hostile environment socially and physically. For instance, in 30+ years I have never seen an MD that had an accessible examination table. If I complain about this two things happen: 1. The MD will suggest I go elsewhere, a different medical practice, and acts insulted. 2. An office manager will call and state that they are not legally required to provide an accessible examinations table and will make every effort to provide a "reasonable accommodation". This is but one minor example that illustrates a much larger problem exists for disabled people when they seek equal and compassionate health care.
William Peace: Thanks (and they're lengthy; I'm trying to write shorter). One nice thing about the financial collapse is that with luck, many of those who clog the what used to be called the practice of medicine and is now called "the health care system" are going to be out of jobs, insurance companies will be affected (I hope), and a whole stratum of people and "protocols" that never belonged in the mix will be gone, leaving doctors and those who work in their offices to have to remember that their job is to serve the patient.
Most doctors can't take criticism or suggestions and always have to be right, I've noticed. There seems to be a need for the disabled and the elderly to unite somehow and for organizations to do and orchestrate a mass campaign of letter-writing, for example, to doctors and "health care providers" about such concerns as you mentioned. The MD who suggests "go elsewhere" probably also has in the back of his/her mind that s/he's spent all this money on an office setup, and now there is something else to buy. They also feel under constant time pressure, especially with HMOs etc. determining their schedules, and think, when they walk into the examining room, ok, I've got X minutes for this patient before I have to go on to the next, and anything that distracts from their time-pressured routine throws them off, as it were, plus they expect that the patient who has been waiting for them is just going to be glad to be seen, and accept their agenda and whatever they say, as they are, after all, the doctor, etc. The more competitive they have to be with one another in attracting business, the more accommodating they are going to have to be, and it would be nice if that scenario manifested as soon as possible.
A few lawsuits wouldn't hurt either. My Lord -- if a doctor won't treat a disabled person as s/he deserves to be treated, who will s/he treat as s/he has a right to be treated??
Lanthe -
Oh, don't shorten them too much! I'll miss reading them otherwise!
I admit I can't always address them properly, but we'd be lost without your comments. You make SHS a lively place to commune.
T.E. -- That's so nice of you to say! But it's SHS that does that! And if I don't start writing less here, I'm not going to get anything done in the outside world. The issues that SHS brings to attention are absolutely mesmerizing.
T.E. -- Also I'm taking up a lot of space. You said "lively" -- that word describes my late mother, and she wanted to live, and, as has happened to others and is happening to others even as we speak, she was not allowed to; having seen what I have, I know how crucial the issues addressed by SHS are, and what any of us may face if we do not defeat the death culture.
I became a "disabled person" about ten years ago. I can only walk with an assistive device.
Before people get all sanctimonious in their comments, I wish they would stop and remember wherther they actually WALK their talk!
Just this past Christmas season, I had to come to the aid of a friend who had been literally "run over" by after-5 shoppers downtown. Rather that stop and HELP a 60-year-old blind male, people WALKED ON and OVER him! After I came to his rescue, I confronted an SECURITY GUARD who had stood by and watched and did NOTHING. His response was that "...I thought he was a drunk..."
Every day, able-bodied public transit users shove me aside in their RUSH to get to the "disabled seating" before I do. Most stare smugly at me after they've ACCOMPLISHED their mission.
Because of my profession, my time is evenly split between Toronto - Canada largest city - and New York, NY/Tampa, FL in the USA. Overall, Canadians hold the gold award for lack of consideration/outright cruelty hands down. Torontonians are probably the RUDEST peopkle I've ever had to deal with anywhere, in point of fact.
New Yorkers are far better than their Canadian neighbors, but PALE when compared to the citizens of Tampa, FL.
Maybe better weather makes people more human and considerate of others. Or maybe "class" and "socialization skills" form a larger part of "education" in warmer climates?
Whatever the reason, I look forward to my upcoming retirement. I'll relocate myself an my family permanently in Florida.
One thing for sure. Adfter I retire, I'll NEVER set foot in Canada again. My patience with the socially challenged, rude and exceedinly ignorant Canadians has just about run out.
Nationalized health care doesn't seem to have had a salutary effect on their attitude.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home