Montana Medical Association Cop Out on Physician-Assisted Suicide
The coalition against assisted suicide is made up of many branches that constitute a rare alliance among people on all sides of the ideological and religious/secular divides that are literally tearing this country and much of Western Civilization apart. Thus, disability rights activists--generally secular, politically liberal, and pro choice on abortion--work energetically with pro life activists on the issue, while agreeing to leave the abortion issue alone. Medical professional organizations and doctors--generally pro choice on abortion--work with Catholic Church on this issue, despite bitterly disagreeing on issues such as contraception. You get the drift.
But I have been worrying in recent years that some physicians groups and doctors don't take this issue with sufficient seriousness--and indeed as I have noted, one of the tactics of the pro assisted suicide forces is to get medical leaders to assume an attitude of "studied neutrality" to legalization. My concern in this regard was heightened by the quotes from the head of the Montana Medical Association published in the American Medical News about the Montana judge imposing a constitutional right to assisted suicide. From the story:
American Medical Association policy opposes physician-assisted suicide because the practice is "fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's role as healer." Officials with the Montana Medical Assn. said the organization has no policy on doctor-aided dying and will not file an amicus brief when the case is appealed.The AMA usually does not join state litigation unless the state medical society asks for help. MMA officials said they had no plans to request the AMA to file a brief. MMA President Kirk L. Stoner, MD, said the society would get involved only if its members or the Supreme Court asks it to weigh in.
Physician-assisted suicide "is not something we've discussed recently," Dr. Stoner said. "We don't have a real reason to get involved right now. There are bigger fish to fry."
If the MMA hasn't discussed the issue lately, it sure should now! With a signature of one judge's pen, it is literally off of the doorstep and in the parlor. What could be more important for the MMA to discuss? Such terminal nonjudgmentalism is an abdication of professional responsibility. Disgraceful.
Labels: Assisted Suicide. Montana. Terminal Nonjudgmentalism. Montana Medical Association.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:56 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
If they have bigger fish to fry, why don't they say what the fish are? I can't resist this, and don't mean to take advantage of the happenstance of someone's name, but "Stoner"? Aren't "stoners" the ones who and whose successors have made coffee bars a major industry? I don't mean in Italy, I mean in Seattle and its derivatives. I heard someone comment the other day on how outflow from 60s San Francisco has ruined Oregon. Which is next to Washington. And where is Montana, again? The death culture doesn't seem unrelated to the drug culture, which parallels the Switzerland-based pharmaceutical industry (and then there's New Jersey, which is famous for its driving style, among other things), and Amsterdam, and from what I remember growing up, first every ad on the nightly news was for some headache or other remedy, and then what started being on the news was the Vietnam war and student protesters and draft-dodgers who coincidentally sat around smoking dope all day, which their predecessor rights activists hadn't, and the Beatles and the rest of the 60s were being touted as a "new age" and a new era of "love" which now, apparently, extends to the "caring" that "helps people die on their own terms," as to nanny government. I just want to know what those bigger fish are, and why, by the way, the head of a state's medical organization would be using that expression. What are these more important concerns, anyway? Why not set them forth so that the interviewer could report what they stated their priorities to be?
And by the way, those "wonder drugs" that no one who wanted to stay in touch with the world at dinnertime could avoid hearing about (how did the human race, which now wants to avoid the inconvenience of life when it's unpleasant, manage all that time before Excedrin for the least little inconvenient headache) came to us courtesy of the experimentation on non-human animals that Nuremberg required and institutionalized, which brought us a generation of medicine that is callous and mercenary, and devalued their lives and sensibilities just as ours now have become devalued.
And now it's not just headache remedies, but drugs that are supposed to "control" kids whose problems, real, perceived, or alleged by parents and "experts," may arise from their parents having been pharmaceutical consumers (courtesy of Nuremberg)causing them instead to commit suicide, and something new devised every other second for everything under the sun, which no one bothers to ask how dare they try to get us to take this stuff in the same ad in which they list how it can harm us (because now health and medicine are a utilitarian matter of "risk comparison") and on top of everything else they want us to ask our doctors about it, because our doctors shouldn't be expected to have to know what we need, what with managed care, pharmaceutical salesmen haranguing and bribing them, etc., let alone have ethics, which now are conveniently assigned to "bioethicists" just as it's now the patient's job to shill for the pharmaceutical company to the doctor, who after all is too busy and too important to have to know what s/he should be prescribing, and thus it really isn't anybody's fault, or wrong, when patients die via "their own preference" via "living wills," by being taken off life support, by euthanasia, by assisted suicide, etc. It's so simple that anyone with a working brain can read it with their eyes closed, and yet no one is saying anything! Because everyone's brain just doesn't seem to be working any more. Despite all the "wonder drugs," despite even coffee!
I'll restrict myself to one final comment. (I'd like also to go off on what Neptune (which rules deception, as well as pharmaceuticals and "compassion") has to do with all this, but I won't.) A society that truly valued life, and health, wouldn't be standing for all this nonsense, and wouldn't be talking about and "striving for" "quality of life" (more money, less discomfort, "retirement planning," "assisted living facilities," "active senior years," "estate planning," "assisted living," "assisted suicide," etc. It would HAVE quality of life, which goes along with morality, and not be trying to "die well," which it also would know how to do. That's how things were before "science" became a god that was supposed to express how "exceptional" we are (read, the wrong path science took courtesy of Galen, the Roman Church, Nazi experimentation, etc.) and how "entitled" we are to its "fruits." Nature already gave us everything we needed, but greed and human arrogance, including a mania for experimentation, gave us the death culture. It's interesting that where medicine is more sophisticated, less costly, and more effective than what we've got here, as in Europe (in some ways, and note that the death culture is there as well), and in other cultures we don't even bother to respect, they don't talk about "quality of life," they live it, and what they've got that's better than what we've got is not based on an industry of animal experimentation or part of the death culture as medicine is here. I've had my life saved when U.S. doctors couldn't do it by techniques that, even including high-tech ones invented in Germany and Switzerland and ignored by U.S. medicine, where careers depend on "studies" using animals, were not developed via animal experimentation the way we do things here, but via intelligence unbound by "animal research protocols"; the kind of thinking that invented them was rational and humanistic, not scientific/mercenary, and regarded "quality of life" as a given rather than a "goal."
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