Andrewtx

A huge second to Rid's advice to be happy! Every great teacher I've ever had has genuinely seemed to be happy to be there teaching. It's hard to look forward to any sort of class when your teacher is obviously wishing they were out playing golf. I've always personally hated the stand-up-and-introduce-yourself stuff. I think it actually makes the whole environment more tense and uncomfortable.

Yes, I believe in God. Very strongly. For some time I did not. But if you think that faith is a subject meant to be argued back and forth, with all the points, counterpoints, and rebuttals of any other debate, then it doesn't surprise me for a second that you don't believe in God. God is something to be felt, not something to be proved. I wouldn't expect someone to want to be convinced to love their wife, and no sooner would I expect them to want to be convinced to believe in God.

I agree with many of your points, such as that there may well be an uneven application of the law involved and that they deserve a full presumption of innocence before all of the facts are presented and defended in court. All of the back and forth quoting is a bit confusing, so I'm just going to respond to your point above for the sake of simplicity. If the allegations are true, which is a large if, then these individuals did more than simply their best. If true, they ventured into a realm that the law simply doesn't give them permission to enter. I still fail to see how this can be compared to an MCI in which resources are devoted foremost to the patients who are most sick but still have a chance of surviving at the expense of those very unlikely to live with even the most heroic of interventions. Perhaps we're talking past each other. Certainly I was taught that very tough decisions have to made in MCIs, but those decisions are made for the betterment of other patients who have a better chance of survival, and not for the comfort of those about to die. Is the indictment fair? Is this scapegoating? Does the situation warrant a whole new set of rules? Those are questions worth asking and answering, but they should be argued on their own merits and not on the merit of what is done in different circumstances. Hopefully that helped clarify my point.

I was responding to this I disagree that it is the same mindset. Clearly in an MCI certain patients are not given the same attention and level of care as if they had been the only patient. But for this to be comparable, you'd have to have someone administering lethal doses at MCIs to patients whose outcome were undoubtedly grave, rather than just moving on to those who could still be helped.

The individuals are charged with second degree murder. They're accused of administering lethal doses of drugs to kill their patients. This is an active effort -- they are actively working to expedite the death of their patients. It is not comparable to leaving one patient whose life is extraordinarily unlikely to be saved or revived in order to work on someone who has a reasonable chance of survival. They're different actions, and certainly have different legal issues at play.

I don't think this is analogous to a mass-casualty triage situation. The fact that some patients who are extremely unlikely to survive are given less or no care than those who have a better chance to be saved involves a passive denial of effort. These individuals are accused of an active effort to terminate the lives of their patients. You might feel that either case is ethically sound, but they are nonetheless different and have to be treated that way -- especially in the eyes of the law.

Very interesting, thanks!

Is this for real? This feels like the cyber version of a crazy man yelling at me on the street. I don't think anyone here needs your validation to be considered a professional. Especially those that have obviously been around here for a long time and have proven themselves to be leaders without having to affix the title squarely on their own chest. :roll:

Nice and concise

I brought up the issue of the medical ethics involved during cases of emergency and so forth in the other thread, so to prevent duplicate posts you might consider just discussing there.

Ace, I'm as suspicious as you are of the whole allegation. But I'm just trying to get at a bigger picture here. Most everyone agrees, for instance, that stealing is wrong and unethical in normal life. But I think few blame those who stole from empty stores to get the things that they needed to survive. (Not the liquor and television thieves, they can go to jail for all I care.) So I'm questioning if there's a parallel in medical care, where what is normally unethical becomes forgivable.

I think the circumstances of Katrina and the extreme explosivity of any issue involving Katrina should give all of us pause. But whatever the legal outcome of this and whatever the reality of what transpired, I want to ask: Are medical ethics absolutely constant? At what point do circumstances reach such an extreme that normal ethical standards become blurred? Euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in the context of a normally functioning hospital is one issue, but should the hellish conditions of a hurricane ravaged hospital beg forgiveness for what would otherwise be inexcusable? Just questions I wonder about. Though again, we don't really know that anything criminal happened at all.

Well Scaramedic beat me to it, but the symptoms are consistent with the patient suffering from migraines, which as the "effort migraine" description illustrates can have numerous triggers. Inefficacy of Advil and Tylenol, nausea and vomiting, and relief through sleep -- sounds like a migraine to me! Edited to add: This isn't a conclusion, just an observation based on the info provided. I would like to know how long she has been taking the oral contraceptive and if there has been any change in type or usage whatsoever.

NKDA = No known drug allergies