Conservatives Are Awfully Silent About Jahi McMath - Page 3

Nope, idiots here pure and simple....only human works for the postman though.
Seriously, our hospital is scary, maybe others not so bad but all of them are money first when it comes to care.
And then there's insurance, costs, and this big sucking sound.

I disagree Moons !!,,postman , hamburger flipper ,dentist, school teacher, doctor = HUMANS!!,,The only difference is the consequences of the error ,,I'm done,,



 

Gsd, I don't make up things to argue with you about, I don't even see any advantage in having argument with you about any topic. The question was somewhat rhetorical and not meant to tweak your dislike for me.

The difference is using (only human) as an excuse doesn't cut it when lives are at stake.
I have a higher expectation of excellence from a doctor than I do the guy who cooks my burger.
Problem is there are lazy half assed slackers in every profession and there needs to be some accountability somewhere.
A lawsuit no matter how much money is involved doesn't replace a loved one.
And some things should involve prison so people take their responsibilities seriously.







 

Joanro,

I don't dislike you, I would need to know you to dislike you. I don't always agree with you but dislike is not a part of whether I disagree with you.
 

Oopsy GSD, I miss the comment you supplied that said you copied.  Rutger1 I was a firefighter and a paramedic for more than a few decades and in my ambulance, my patients always received competent skilled medical treatment.

Have I seen crap treatment of patients by hospitals, hell yes.  I have picked up patients that I just dropped off at the ER hours ago who had been "streeted" because they have no insurance.  I had a huge f**k up on a surgery that resulted in life threatening complications and 4 months of horrific agony that Morphine and Fentanyl didn't touch. I was blown off for months and told I was making a big deal out of recovery, I was milking my recovery, I was imagining things.  I finally got my doctor to listen to me and send me for an MRI which showed I had very serious complications and I should never have survived longer than a few hours after my surgery.  I was told by the specialists that my pain was 100 times worse than what bone cancer eating my spine and nerves was after they found out what was wrong.  (Yes my MRI and case is written up in medical journals and text books). 

My ER doc friend who retired at 85 and has practiced medicine his entire adult life puts it best in my opinion. "Medicine is like magic, you hope the patient or family was honest and forthcoming in the information they give you, then you hope you guess correctly what's wrong, grab your book of magic, choose the right spell, grab your ingredients and equipment, and then pray God has not decided to call your patient home". 

Ruger, I think you have to distinguish between the medical staff
in hospitals, and the administration of hospitals.  When Moons
talks about a "ploy" to make money out of people in need of
medical attention, he is quite right, insofar as the 'money men' are
the people whose attitudes could do with retweaking, and who should
be made more accountable.   With the doctors & nurses, yeah no one
​is perfect and mistakes do get made, but in the main probably they
are not the ones who need their attitude adjusted.  The accountants and
other non-medical personnel, the management of the hospitals, now they
are out to make as much as they can, and they are who ultimately say
"this needs a helicopter trip, this doesn't" or "yes we can afford to keep this
person on life support, no this one is too far gone" ​etc.  You might think
these are medical decisions;  but ultimately, they are not, the docs have
guidelines and constraints to work within - and I suspect there are many
arguments about these sort of situations that the relatives and the public
do not see.
 

Ruger1,
without giving you a hard time which is not my intent, that's real bull shit and I'm glad I never ran into your ER witch doctor.

Hundmutter,
The first responders here on the scene know you need to be airlifted to a trauma hospital but here they stop off at the local hospital so they can get their cut, it's wrong and it puts people lives at risk.
It's a bad policy not someone's choice.

I will not be kept on life support, it is my decision and my families, no one else's.
 

Actually, Moons, the 1st responders take you to the local hospital so you CAN be airlifted to a fully-equipped trauma center--you can't just call up a medical air ambulance on the phone and tell them to meet you at the airport, after all.  You need to be taken someplace where you can not only be stabilized, but can get additional support care as needed while awaiting the airlift. 

I'm presently sitting here watching the Independent Lens program "How to Survive A Plague", which hits me where I live, even as this discussion here does. I lost my second-youngest brother at the age of 32, to renal failure subsequent from the mishandling of a nephrotoxic IV drug he was prescribed to treat an opportunistic virus that was blinding him as a result of his fully-advanced AIDS status in 1996. The drug, which I administered to him daily via a central line, was supposed to be diluted 1:1 with saline, but his second shipment had NOT been prepared correctly, despite my questioning the organization which made the delivery about that very point.  Yes, because where he stood in the timeline of AIDS treatment, my brother was going to almost unquestionably die from some opportunistic infection at some point, but he didn't have to die of renal failure because he'd been given a known nephrotoxic drug undiluted for seven days--so I am painfully familiar with the lapses in performance by people in the field of human medicine.

It happens. Yes, there ARE incompetent and lazy physicians, nurses, radiologists, etc. in the field of human medicine. Just as such people exist in the fields of teaching, auto mechanics, food processing, textile manufacturing and every other job that exists. There are also outstanding people in that field, and average ones as well.  And sometimes, even excellent doctors make errors because they're overtired, or juggling too many cases at one time, or they simply missed something, and even because the patient or their family haven't been honest with the provider, or haven't given the whole story to the provider--because shit happens, and as Ruger already said, health care providers are no different than the rest of us: imperfect humans.  I find it rather amusing when people belittle the professions because of their own bad experiences with individual members of them, because I simply can't help but wonder why anyone thinks they are owed a miracle--and when medicine works well, it IS a miracle; science IS a miracle, and anyone who fails to see that is fooling themselves.  

This McMath case is a sad one, for a variety of reasons. The question of why a 'simple' tonsillectomy led to where the situation presently stands isn't as simple as it's made out to be; first, we have to look at WHY this surgery was being done. It wasn't because the young girl had been subject to repeated bouts of tonsillitis--it was being done to address a severe sleep apnea condition, one severe enough that it warranted a surgical procedure to address because without some intervention, she was likely to die in her sleep.   Given that before surgical intervention is considered, a sleep apnea patient--and in this case, since it involved a minor, her family--would be given the less invasive prescriptions to treat the condition first: addressing the problem of the child's obesity, and the use of CPAP equipment to control her breathing.  Of course, neither of these courses of treament/management are fast, easy or pleasant to experience--so what is the doctor left with, when the patient and her family fail with those courses?  When the family insists that the doctors DO something to control the child's sleep apnea?  This child was not a prime candidate for any sort of surgery, between the obesity AND the apnea problem, and it's not uncommon for there to be the very complications she experienced when this particular type of surgery done on someone of or above the age of puberty.  Did the surgeon, and the aftercare staff, make mistakes in how she was handled? Possibly.  If they did, that must be addressed, but it doesn't change the present circumstances, and the fact is that right now, this child's brain has ceased to function, and her organs will follow in short order if she is taken off life support.

For anyone who feels the medical field is primarily populated by slackjawed, ignorant, and disinterested individuals, you always have the option of not patronizing those people or the facilities which employ them--you can always take your health troubles to your favorite witch doctor, or medicine woman, or your neighbor's grandmama from the old country. I don't consider anyone in the health professions to be infallible, immortal or godlike, and I don't expect them to work alone--as a patient, I have a responsibility to participate in my own health care, and suffer the consequences of my failures to follow the recommendations and instructions of my health care team.  If I'm overweight [and I am], I have no right to complain to my doctor if my knees are painful--in spite of the fact that they were already painful when I was just 14 and didn't carry an extra ounce--and I have to accept that there are limitations as to what my doctors can offer in the way of respite for that pain, and that there may be serious side-effects from anything they are able to offer as well.

The McMath girl's family contradicts themselves in saying that they won't accept the declaration of brain death because her heart is still beating, and citing their religious convictions as the basis for that refusal; after all, if their religion teaches that the ultimate goal is to leave this dimension and join the deities they worship in the next one, then why artificially tether their loved one here? 

GSD Admin, you mused as to why there hasn't been any bandwagon-boarding by the usual conservative players in the political and activist lineup, and I think we all know the reasons for that--wrong demographics, insufficient wealthy oxen being gored via the circumstances, AND a biding of time to see how this can be best spun into an 'anti-ACA' example.The Schiavo case differed in many ways, not just because of the demographics, either--in that case, you had the immediate blood relatives of the patient fighting against the legal next-of-kin, her spouse, not to mention the insinuation from the blood relatives that the spouse had played some role in how the the patient came to be in that condition in the first place. Plus, the present governor of CA isn't jockeying for a presidential nomination, either. 

One thing is for sure--any adult who does not have both a Living Will and an Advance Directive in place is a fool who risks placing their loved ones in a very difficult situation should something befall them where you're on life support and there's decisions that need be made. To do that to someone you profess to care for is as cruel, IMO, as it is unnecessary.