The Serpent's Caduceus
by pessimist
According to the Hippocratic Oath, doctors will prescribe regimens for the good of the patients according to their ability and judgement and never do harm to anyone, prescribe a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause death.
Imagine what it had to take to cause these medicos to deliberately violate that oath:
We had to kill our patients
New Orleans: Doctors forced to 'play God'
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.
And you can bet that all of Bu$hCo will sleep well tonight.
'These people were going to die anyway'
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.
"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second. I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process. It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity."There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing. Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.
"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."
The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end."
Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."
And we wonder why King George avoids taking responsibility for his share of the blame!
He just might be expected to answer to some of these ghosts.
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