Sick children and even disabled
newborn babies, are reportedly being discharged from NHS hospitals in England
only to die slowly at home or in hospices in an unfathomable manner. The
innocent children are being put on controversial “death pathways,” once only
thought to have involved elderly and terminally ill adult patients.
The Liverpool Care
Pathway (LCP), an organization that facilitates end-of-life treatment, is
behind the inhumane program. The Daily Mail has learned the
process of “withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn
babies.” In other words, patients — young and old — are slowly starved and
dehydrated to death.One doctor, acting as a whistle blower, admitted to starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital in a leading medical journal. The doctor describes it as a 10-day process, during which the baby becomes “smaller an shrunken.”
Roughly 130,000 elderly and
terminally ill patients reportedly die on the Liverpool Care Pathway, or “death
pathways.” LCP is now being independently investigated at the orders of
ministers in England.
The Daily Mail has more details on this tragic story:
The investigation,
which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to
hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.
Medical critics of
the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result
the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of
euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.
The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn
babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.
The previously mentioned doctor wrote
of the pain of watching the slow, forced deaths of newborn babies. One baby’s
parents decided to put their infant on the “pathway” because of a “lengthy list
of unexpected congenital anomalies,” according to the doctor.
Here’s some of what the doctor wrote
in the medical journal [emphasis added]:
The voice on the
other end of the phone describes a newborn baby and a lengthy list of
unexpected congenital anomalies. I have a growing sense of dread as I listen.
The parents want ‘nothing
done’ because they feel that these anomalies are not consistent with a basic
human experience. I know that once decisions are made, life support will be
withdrawn.
Assuming this baby
survives, we will be unable to give feed, and the parents will not want us to
use artificial means to do so.
Regrettably, my
predictions are correct. I realise
as I go to meet the parents that this will be the tenth child for whom I have
cared after a decision has been made to forgo medically provided feeding.
Like other parents
in this predicament, they are now plagued with a terrible type of wishful
thinking that they could never have imagined. They wish for their child to die
quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped.
They wish for
pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to
their precious baby.
Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my
experience. Survival is
often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous
patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.
After reading the article in the
British Medical Journal, Dr. Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St.
George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London, wrote on the BMJ website: “It is a huge
supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.”
“The LCP was devised by the Marie Curie
Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool for care of dying adult patients more
than a decade ago. It has since been developed, with [pediatric] staff at Alder
Hey Hospital, to cover children. Parents have to agree to their child going on
the death pathway, often being told by doctors it is in the child’s ‘best
interests’ because their survival is ‘futile’,” The Daily Mail reports.
Obviously, not everyone agrees.
Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, wrote to the Cabinet Office and
the Department of Health and blasted the use of death pathways for young
children.
“The parents feel coerced, at a very
traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they
are told by doctors has only has a few days to live,” she wrote. “It is very
difficult to predict death. I have seen a reasonable number of children recover
after being taken off the pathway.”
She went on: “I have also seen
children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until
they die…I witnessed a 14 year-old boy
with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors
refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for
us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.”
For now the inquiry into the death
pathways is ongoing. A Department of Health spokesman said that “End of life
care for children must meet the highest professional and clinical standards,
and the specific needs of children at the end of their life.”
But as Teresa Lynch, a spokeswoman
for the Medical Ethics Alliance, points out: “There are big questions to be
answered about how our sick children are dying.”
Source: The Blaze Posted on November
29, 2012 at 5:28pm by Jason Howerton To read more of the anonymous doctor’s
testimony in the British Medical Journal,
(H/T: Drudge)
Comments:
We need to look for
ways to avoid medical treatment that is dictated by the government. These parents and their sick children would
be better off staying away from the hospitals. “First do no harm” no longer
exists where government is in charge of patient care. State laws should be
written to strip away the monopoly power being assumed by the Federal
government.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
