We had to kill our patients because of bad weather.

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We had to kill our patients
by C AROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY, Mail on Sunday

09:01am 11th September 2005
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/liv ... _a_source=

Did all of the patients euthanized give informed consent? Normally I don't approve of euthinasia, but in this scenario, there doesn't appear to have been any options that were really better or worse.

what an impossible moral decision. i'm not saying whether or not they were right to do what they did, but i most certainly wouldn't want to have to make a decision like that.

when you're in that liminal situation and forced into making those sorts of decisions, the question of "right and wrong" balances on a knife edge, to the point of being almost irrelevant. my own spiritual path means i have to make decisions of that ilk (although never anywhere near as drastic, i have to add, thank the gods).

i do hope no-one judges them before they examine their own hearts. of course, many people have a value system which says "it's not up to me, it's up to god". well, lucky them, for having an external locus of control.

those doctors took the responsibility. i have no doubt some of them will be villified for doing that. i, for one, certainly will not be doing so, whether i agree with their actions or not.

I think they did what they thought was the best thing at the time for the welfare of their patients.

It would be too easy to judge them retrospectively or out of context of the situation they were in.

It is clearly wrong that this situation came about, let's hope that some important lessons have been learnt by those that are/should be planning for such disasters in the future..

The only way I think that such a thing could be justified is it they could prove mathematically in court that doing away with a few people who were draining sparse resouces and were going to die anyway saved more lives than they took. Speaking of resouces, if you are going to go through that much trouble to save resources, it seems that it would have been better to just give them a regular but generous dose of morphine and put a pillow over their faces to save more morphine and other supplies for those that stand a chance of making it. Since the medical staff didn't even have any food and were shooting up a sugar solution to keep working, doing something like tht might not be quite as obscene as it sounds.

Saying that they "killed their patients because of bad weather" is a gorss understatement and oversimplification....

These people were dying and a majority of them were in a lot of pain. It isn't like they were going to live if the doctors hadn't given them the morphine.

Furthermore, the hospital wards were about to be overtaken by rapists and looters...personally, if I had termional cancer and was in a helluva lot of pain, the last thing I'd want to endure before finally dying would be a whole bunch of brutal guys jumping my bones....

I think it was the best and most merciful thing they could have done.

Thanks for necroing a 9 year old thread.

I don't like the new front page at all. It was much better when threads appeared as they were newly posted. The way it is now is completely random.

I envy those patients. i wish I could be euthanized this very minute.

To me this article is a sad reminder of what an unhealthy attitude we, as a society, have towards death. There is this fundamental assumption (usually unspoken) that death is just the worst thing ever - anything has to be better than death. This strikes me as completely ludicrous, considering that it's guaranteed to happen to every one of us. The decision is not between dying and living, it's between dying sooner and dying later. When you look at this way the doctors' actions seem perfectly reasonable and the really sad thing is that they felt it necessary to mentally torture themselves over this. This is something akin to kids in certain religions being made to feel guilty for masturbating, except that this is very common.