(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

I remember when I read this, I hoped that these doctors and nurses wouldn't be prosecuted, and simultaneously knew that of course they would be aggressively prosecuted, because it is the perfect scapegoat for our murderous administration.

Today the AP reported that a doctor and two nurses have been arrested in connection with the deaths of patients at a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina hit the city, the Louisiana attorney general's office said Tuesday.

The three were arrested late Monday and booked on suspicion of second-degree murder, said Kris Wartelle, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Charles C. Foti.

Memorial Medical Center was cut off by flood water in the immediate aftermath of the Aug. 29 hurricane. Power went out and the temperature inside the building rose over 100 degrees as patients waited four days to be evacuated.

At least 34 patients died at Memorial during that time, 10 of them patients of the hospital's owner Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. and 24 patients in a facility run by LifeCare Holdings Inc., a separate company.

Over the winter, Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard said samples were taken from dozens of patients who died at various hospitals and nursing homes to test for potentially lethal doses of drugs such as morphine.

Chalk up one more the the Culture of Life, riding the coathanger into moral oblivion, the way Slim Pickens rides the nuclear missile in Dr. Strangelove.

Comments

[watchamacallit.livejournal.com]

They did what they had to. The patients could have made it if they were evacuated earlier. The wrong people are on trial here.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Dear god. So it's better to ... what, leave them to die "naturally" and in agony because of a government screw-up? This is stomach-turning ....

[already2late.livejournal.com]

The CNN story on this almost made me ill. You can completely picture this one full-of-himself, fundie, right-to-life doctor, with all of his high-handed selfimportance, turning the others in.

[atallvlad.livejournal.com]

Daily outrages like this make me wonder at what point will I become apathetic?

[keylolo.livejournal.com]

what ever happened to quality of life as opposed to quantity of life? they would have died anyway, so it seems better to me to die from an overdose of morphine than to rot away with no chance of rescue.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

What no one is saying is that this is on a continuum with SOP at many hospitals. The idea is you give morphine for pain, with death as the side-effect of the dosage. I am aware of at least three terminally ill people form whom this was done, and my MD friends regard it as standard practice, though many doctors and nurses won't do it. I suspect that what happened in NO is that the practioners who did it ordinarily wouldn't have -- would ordinarily have refused -- so they felt about it and described it to others in ways that say a right-to-life doctor forced by moral circumstances to perform an abortion might describe the abortion she performed. I think people I know would have said, instead, that they gave huge doses of morphine to still the agony of the patients, with death as an unfortunate side-effect. And then nothing would have happened to them.

There was a famous article in I think JAMA or maybe the NEJM on this sort of practice a few years ago.

[bord-du-rasoir.livejournal.com]

That is extremely shitty. I can't believe they arrested them.

They should arrest all the police, doctors, nurses, emergency personnel who left before they should arrest those who stayed and may or may not have euthanized patients.

We lived in a fucked up world. Our government punishes those who are dedicated to helping others. And our goverment sanctions the wholly unnecessary killing and displacement of Lebanese who have nothing to do with supporting Hezbollah.