Thursday, June 30, 2016

Frontiers In Medicine

     Perhaps that should be non-medicine:

     Now, a medical journal is upping the stakes by calling such interventions [i.e., care provided to prolong a patient’s life] “non-beneficial treatment (NBT):” From the International Journal for Quality in Healthcare article (my emphasis):
     The term NBT therefore reflects an objective inverse correlation between intensity of treatment and the expected degree of improvement in a patient’s health status, ability for survival to hospital discharge or improvement in quality of life.

     Note that keeping the patient alive because the patient wants to stay alive isn’t mentioned. In other words, the medical technocrats and bioethicists are redefining the core purpose of medicine — maintaining life when that is wanted — and claiming that keeping a patient alive can be non-beneficial.

     This is what we of a classical bent like to call a straw in the wind. The event itself may be of minor significance, but the direction in which it points is critical.

     “Bioethicists” have made similar statements several times. The odious Daniel Callahan is notorious for them. His most notable disclosures of opinion concern weighing advances in medicine against “other social goods” and the immorality of consuming medical resources to prolong the lives of the elderly when those resources could be used elsewhere. If opinions such as his are gaining a foothold in the thinking of medical care providers, we elderly Baby Boomers are in for a rough (but short) ride.

     And you thought ObamaCare was about access to health care for everybody, eh?

4 comments:

Pascal said...

Frontiers in medicine AND advancement of the death cults.

Malatrope said...

There is nothing new about this, Fran. Socialists are monsters, robots. Always have been, always will be.

One thing in which they have succeeded is in reducing the value of their own lives. They of course do not realize this. They will not comprehend the irony when they are eventually faced down by someone with a weapon who states "you are a non-beneficial lifeform" and proceeds to calmly and coldly eliminate them.

0007 said...

ANNNNND Sarah Palin is proven correct yet again.

FredLewers said...

Frequently, people who want to stay alive at any cost are unprepared to meet their creator and face their ordained moment of judgment.
In my experience, (and I've been to several funerals and visited many friends and relatives who were facing imminent demise) the people who had a sound relationship with God through Christ had factored quality of life into their medical treatment decisions.
The few progressives and leftward people I knew in those circumstances were MUCH more likely to grasp at the straws of elusive hope offered by extreme medical intervention...
The future irony will be unappreciated by most of the quasi-socialist caste.