medical ethics

The Organization That Will Help You Kill Yourself for $20,000…What a Deal! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“People” magazine is carrying the depressing story of Maureen Slough, (above), an Irish woman, 58, who told her family she was going on vacation to Lithuania with a friend. However, she confided to two friends that she would really be traveling alone to Switzerland, where a non-profit there would help her to kill herself.

And that’s what she did, after paying the organization, Pegasos, in Liestal, Switzerland, £15,000 (a bit more than 20,000 U.S. dollars) for the assistance.

A brief digression: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and had been since 1942. It isn’t euthanasia which is illegal but often isn’t punished here in the U.S. and elsewhere: the patients kill themselves with prescribed drugs, and doctors aren’t involved beyond writing a legal prescription. (Writing a prescription for a drug that the doctor knows the patient will use to commit suicide is, in my view, a violation of medical ethics.)

Maureen’s adult daughter received a text message on WhatsApp from Pegasos informing her that her mother had died. That was nice of them. “What was worse was not only did I get the text on WhatsApp, they had advised me that her ashes would be posted to me in 6-8 weeks,” she said. “In that very moment, because I was alone, I just sat there with the baby and cried… I just felt like my world ended.”

Later, Slough’s ashes arrived.

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Surgeon…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Don’t you just hate it when you’re under anesthesia for a serious operation, and while you’re unconscious your surgeon lets her 13-year-old daughter take over?

Graz University Hospital in Austria ( Graz is the regional capital of Styria, Austria’s second-largest state) released this apology: “The hospital’s management would like to express its utmost regret and extend its sincere apologies for this incident, and is working to fully clarify the matter.” The “matter” is this: After a 33-year-old man was flown to the hospital with serious head injuries following an accident, the female neurosurgeon, whose name has not been revealed so far, apparently allowed her 13-year-old daughter to scrub in. Maybe it was “take your daughter to work” day or something, but the aspiring distaff Doogie Howser was accused by a whistle-blowing member of the surgical team of actively taking part in the emergency surgery, including drilling a hole in the patient’s skull to relieve pressure from cranial bleeding.

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Medical Ethics Dunce: Dr. Peter McCollough

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bandy Lee wasn’t the only alleged medical expert to pronounce then-President Donald Trump mentally disabled (so that one of the Axis plots to remove him from office without having to go through that annoying democratic election thingy could be activated) without actually examining him, but she was the one who exploited her unethical conduct the most effectively to get repeated gigs on MSNBC.

Finally Yale fired her, as she was habitually and noisily breaching basic professional ethics including the so-called “Goldwater Rule,” installed by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to prohibit members from offering psychological opinions about individuals they had not personally examined.

Please note that the rule didn’t make what Lee and others did unethical: it was unethical with or without the rule. It is unfair, presumptuous and an abuse of position and authority to diagnose non-patients from afar, particularly in a political context where such fake medical verdicts can be used as partisan weapons.

Yet there was cardiologist Dr. Peter McCollough yesterday, giving an interview on the web’s “Breanna Morello Show” and diagnosing Joe Biden with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s while opining that both may be the result of a bad reaction to the Covid vaccines. Before diagnosing the President, he explained that he wouldn’t give a diagnosis because doing so would be unethical, and then immediately diagnosed him.

Nice.

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Comment Of The Day: “Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Most of the comments on EA posts come from a solid base of experience and knowledge, but it is especially welcome when a commenter enlightens us on a subject he or she really knows well. Thus Tom P.’s observations on the pharmaceutical industry in light of the EA post on the Perdue Pharma/Sackler/ OxyContin horror as dramatized in “Painkiller” is a special pleasure. Here it is, a Comment of the Day:

***

I apologize for the length of this post, but the topic is complicated and does not lend itself to sound bites. What follows is my experience and opinions based on working in the pharmaceutical industry and extensive reading on my part.

Full disclosure: I am a retired pharmaceutical company executive. During my career, I worked for various cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies. I held positions in R&D, manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain management. For most of my career, I was responsible for a major Pharma manufacturer’s anticancer and biologics global supply chains. As a point of reference, I have not seen “Dopesick” or “Painkiller”. I am familiar, however, with the travesty the Sacklers perpetrated on the sick and society. The best summary of their unethical and probably criminal behavior I have read is in an LA Times May 5, 2016, article: https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

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The Disastrous Crash Of Medical Ethics, In Two Videos [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Earlier this week, I discussed the frightening and discouraging phenomenon of American professions becoming so politicized that they no longer can be trusted to serve public interests objectively and competently. If a profession cannot be trusted, then it is no longer a profession. Laura Hollis’s point in “Death of the Professions” is worth repeating:

The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.

The previous post discussed this phenomenon in the context of the legal profession and its legal ethics extension, but arguably the partisan pollution of the medical profession has been worse. It has become a full participant in the newly-recognized Transsexual Promotion Ethics Train Wreck even as it is running down children: so much for “Do no harm.”

Re-watching “The Silence of the Lambs” last week, I was reminded that once the few clinics performing sex-change surgeries would apply stringent standards to applicants. “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer in the film (and novel) was turned down for such surgery multiple times. Today, apparently, the radical procedures are no longer considered potentially harmful because the medical profession has bought into the deceptive, benign sounding cover-phrase, “gender affirming treatment.”

In the video above, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) pressed expert witnesses yesterday about the scientific justification for sex-change treatments of children and the authority for claims of the potential long-term benefits of these usually irreversible procedures. His Subcommittee on Health has convened to take up a number of proposals concerning health care access and research support, and Crenshaw wants to ensure that taxpayer money is not used to fund sex-change surgery on kids. “This is taxpayer money, and when 70% of taxpayers opposed these barbaric treatments on minors, then taxpayers should not fund it,” he said.

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Not Unethical, Just Narcissistic And Stupid, But Criticism Goes With The Territory

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

31-year-old Theresia Fischer, who starred on Germany’s “Celebrity Big Brother,” has paid $160,000 for two painful surgeries that added five and a half inches to each leg. Now she is six feet tall in her stocking feet, six-four in those platforms.

The doctors inserted adjustable telescopic rods into her tibiae. I believe that this is a violation of medical ethics, as she had no actual malady that required medical intervention, and the procedure involved risk, as all medical procedures do. However, cosmetic surgeons tend to be live on the bottom of the ethics barrel.

In her publicity campaign celebrating being turned into a freak, she extols what the operation has done for her sex life, but also complains that she has been the target of “hate” on the web, where she is well-followed on TikTok and Instagram. “Why am I subject to so much hate?” she lamented to the New York Post.

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Does The Medical Profession Think That “Shoulder Width Reduction Surgery” Is The Ethical Practice Of Medicine?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Shoulder width reduction is an extreme form of surgery designed to allow men transitioning to glorious womanhood look the way they feel. The procedure involves a surgeon sawing sections of the patient’s clavicle off and  fusing the remaining pieces back together with a metal plate. The surgery generally costs  thousands of dollars;  you can see it being performed here. There is also the reverse procedure for women who have decided to be male, or who want to look like Joan Crawford.

Once upon a time, before the medical profession was completely perverted by fear of lawsuits and the love of money, surgery that served no functional purpose was regarded as unethical. The gold mine that is cosmetic surgery changed all that, along with greasing many slippery slopes. If a teenage girl’s parents felt she would be more popular and happy with a cute little turned up nose, then that was sufficient benefit to make the surgery ethical. Next it was just a few slips down the slope to similarly justify surgery to give some whacko pointy ears like an elf, or a split tongue like a lizard, or to make someone look like a doll…

Or a cat….

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Horrifying Or Hilarious? Joy Behar Delves Into Medical Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Even though more than the usual number of mainstream media lackeys have been willing to suck it up and admit that the Fetterman-Oz debate last night was a disaster for Democrats, enough integrity-free hacks have reached for way to blame everyone but the candidate. But as Leo Bloom memorably said when his scheme failed in “The Producers,” “No way out…no way out….” This can’t be blamed on anyone but John Fetterman, his party and his staff. He should have withdrawn after his stroke in May. He should have been transparent about his medical condition. If he couldn’t talk right, and couldn’t process what he heard, then he should have just said he wasn’t capable of debating, and let voters deal with that as they chose. Instead, he subjected listeners to these painful moments:

I was preparing a post on the absurd lengths Democrats and journalists are going to try to minimize the damage., and then stumbled upon what Joy Behar added to the whitewash effort on “The View.” This deserves a special spotlight. It is not only the dumbest attempt to help Fetterman, it is not only peak commentator stupid, but it is peak “The View” stupid and peak Joy Behar stupid as well.

Today she said—I wouldn’t kid you:

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Ethics Dunce: Plastic Surgeon Dr. Costanza, I Mean Scott Green

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Dr. Scott Green, a plastic surgeon, tried to appear before a judge during a remote video-conferenced traffic trial last week from his operating room, while he was working on a patient. This was not a reality show stunt: Green really attempted to do this. Saved time, you know. Busy, busy, busy. Sacramento Superior Court Commissioner Gary Link, presiding over a virtual courtroom at the Carol Miller Justice Center, couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a defendant in surgical scrubs, with his patient just out of view.

“Hello, Mr. Green? Are you available for trial?” asked a courtroom clerk. “It kind of looks like you’re in an operating room right now?” “I am, sir,” Green replied. “Yes, I’m in an operating room right now. I’m available for trial. Go right ahead.” The doctor had his head down, talking as he replaced a nose, pumped up some breasts, or something. Link was dumbstruck.

“So unless I’m mistaken, I’m seeing a defendant that’s in the middle of an operating room appearing to be actively engaged in providing services to a patient. Is that correct, Mr. Green? Or should I say Dr. Green?” Link asked. The video is on YouTube, and one can hear the sounds of medical devices at work, pumping and beeping.

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Tales Of The Great Stupid: Wow…Who Could Have Seen THIS Coming?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Children are being bombarded by media and social media propaganda asserting that a vast number of people are trapped in bodies having the “wrong” sex organs, and celebrating the “T’s in the LGBTQ+ interest-group-of-convenience as the cool new martyrs. Thus an increasing number of these children convince their woke and irresponsible parents, and doctors who would rather be politically correct than “do no harm,” to divert their fates from the natural biological path to something else, because everybody is doing it, or everybody is saying it’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t take much to figure out this is a terrible trend based on terrible reasoning, but there are so many such trends and ideas flourishing now that it’s hard to bat them all away.

And so we have the case of 23-year-old Keira Bell in Great Britain, who is suing a National Health Service gender clinic that she says should have challenged her decision to transition to male as a teenager. A tomboy as a child, Keira says her determination to switch gender gradually built up as she found out more about transitioning online, and “one step led to another.”

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