Maryland House Bill 30: De-professionalizing the Care of People With Terminal Illnesses
In addition to pushing assisted suicide, groups like Compassion and Choices yearn for respectability and desire to be seen as legitimate care givers for patients, at least in an informational context. That was part of the point last year when California passed AB 2747, requiring doctors to inform patients with one year or less to live of their terminal care options, such as refusing to eat or hospice. (As originally written, it would have permitted patients to demand to be sedated and dehydrated to death--a back door method of assisted suicide.) If the doctor doesn't wish to so counsel, he or she is required to refer terminally ill patients to another doctor or to organizations that counsel the terminally ill in such matters. Not coincidentally, the bill was co-sponsored by Patty Berg, the good pal of Compassion and Choices (formerly Hemlock Society), that "counsels" the terminally ill, including about assisted suicide. So, while the original euthanasia purpose of the bill failed, assisted suicide groups took a big step forward by becoming approved conduits of information.
Two Maryland Delegates (Bobo and Manno) are now pushing this same line, with House Bill 30. If it passes, groups like C and C will be able to set up shop as an organization "specializing" in providing information for end-of-life care and receive referrals from doctors for patient counseling. No link yet [Update: Here is link], but here is the relevant language filed last year in preparation for the current legislative session:
E- Terminal Condition Care Counseling may include:...3) Information from organizations specializing in terminal condition care that provide information on fact sheets and Internet Websites to convey the information.It is worth noting that there are no minimal credentials required for the counselors in the legislation, nor any minimal training for qualified "counselors." Isn't that odd? I mean, if this counseling is so important it must be legally required--then isn't its value diminished by setting such a low bar for qualifying to receive physician referrals? (Another clause of the legislation states that the organization need only be on that "specializes in terminal condition case management and consultation.") Indeed, doesn't this open the door to what are, in essence, advocacy groups pushing their agendas in the guise of "counseling?" As such, doesn't this bill actually de-professionalize the field?
Of course patients and their doctors need to work through these important issues together. But proposals such as this are not only unnecessary and very loosely worded, they certainly seem to have agendas that go far beyond ensuring that patients receive appropriate information about proper end-of-life care.
Labels: Maryland House Bill 30. Deprofessionalizing Health Care.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:56 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
What is this with the setting of a time of how long someone has left to live in the first place? Setting the existence of such a possibility in the first place is an assumption on which the rest is built, and it's never a good idea to begin with an assumption. It's wrong to assume that doctors can even know this. They themselves admit how often they are wrong about it. Yet they keep doig it and the world assumes that they are able to do it. Well, this is a way to make sure the predictions to that effect come out right, isn't it.
What a way to drum up business. Not to mention the requiring physicians to make such referrals.
"Terminal condition case management consultation"? What kind of social-work speak is that? "Deprofessionalize"? "Field"? Since when is it a field, let alone a profession? When words like "ensuring," "counselling," "appropriate" and "end-of-life" start getting used, there is already trouble.
One YEAR?
a - A lot can happen in a year. Look at pernicious anemia - it was a certain death sentence before the discovery that you could eat liver every day, followed by the discovery that you could take B12 supplements, and solve your problem. I know a man who had leukemia, and was told that he had two years, max; in the intervening two years a treatment for his particular disease was developed and he is now disease-free.
b - But even without the development of a new treatment, there's no way a doctor can say with confidence that a patient has a year to live. I've known of people who were "given" six weeks and lasted two, and people who were "given" a few months and lasted several years. If a doctor is experienced, and honest, I believe he or she will tell you that predictions a year out are impossible to make accurately.
So even putting aside the moral issues, should anyone want to do so, it's still evident that this is illogical and stupid.
If a Dr. does not want to provide assisted suicide counseling to a terminally ill person, requiring him to send the patient to someone who will is, in my opinion, STILL making the first Dr. "assist" in a suicide!
An awful lot of what "science" claims as "advances" can be figured out by simple common sense. We have abrogated our responsibility to use our heads and delegated it to "science" which we then "thank" for, basically, nothing, and what we could have done in the first place ourselves, and that in turn leaves "science" and those who "practice" it free to claim superior knowledge.
Jan: That's right. It's a shell game.
I just read the other day a medical authority being quoted as admitting that medicine's track record on predicting how long someone "has" is notoriously bad. No one "has" any more than the present moment, and it takes colossal arrogance and stupidity (well those two things go hand in hand, don't they) to "predict" ANYTHING beyond that.
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