Yes, ten percent of hospital deaths in the Netherlands are state sponsored murder, involuntary euthanasia.
Rick Santorum is attracting a great deal of outrage for his statement that to control medical costs in the Netherlands, ten percent of patients are involuntarily euthanized – murdered to save on medical costs. The mainstream media is producing a pile of articles claiming that he is lying.
Anyone who dies in hospital under deep prolonged barbiturate sedation is being murdered, for prolonged deep barbiturate sedation stops you from breathing, and ten percent of hospital deaths in the Netherlands occur under prolonged deep barbiturate sedation.
So Rick Santorum is telling the truth, and the mainstream media are lying, as are the dutch government and medical authorities.
A few hours under deep barbiturate sedation is risky enough that the manufacturers instructions require the patient to be constantly watched at all times until he is back to normal, because he is quite likely to stop breathing, requiring emergency measures to get him breathing again. After few days of deep sedation, the patient will surely stop breathing, and, absent appropriate emergency measures to get him breathing again, swiftly die.
The paper is confusing, making it hard to check some secondary questions I had. Does it rule out the possibility of voluntary euthanasia under prolonged deep barbiturate saturation, or old-fashioned incompetence and iatrogenics, making up some fraction of the ten percent?
There is never any medical reason to keep people under deep barbiturate sedation for lengthy periods. If you want to ease the discomfort of dying, you give them a fentanyl drip.
People under deep barbiturate sedation require constant attention, because they are so likely to stop breathing and die, so unless your intent is that they stop breathing and die, you are not going to put them under such sedation except for short periods and with very good reason.
The paper states that very few of those who died under “deep sedation” agreed to be euthenized.
“In 83% of cases sedation was induced by benzodiazepines”
Benzodiazepine? “Although benzodiazepines are much safer in overdose than their predecessors, the barbiturates, they can still cause problems in overdose […] may include […] respiratory depression,[…] The benefits of benzodiazepines are least and the risks are greatest in the elderly. […] Benzodiazepines should be prescribed to the elderly only with caution and only for a short period at low doses.”
Thanks for the correction – benzodiazepine, not barbiturate.
But it is still murder to deeply sedate someone on benzodiazepine indefinitely, unless you have him watched 24/7 by people who can swiftly put him on a respirator.
Eh, you were close enough. All your conclusions hold.
Put bluntly, La Wik is a better doctor than Norwegian doctors, in the case of the elderly, as measured by health outcome. That really really shouldn’t happen.
“They can be very useful in intensive care to sedate patients receiving mechanical ventilation or those in extreme distress. Caution is exercised in this situation due to the occasional occurrence of respiratory depression, and it is recommended that benzodiazepine overdose treatment facilities should be available.”
The paper is confusing on purpose. Also, moral confusion reigns in the minds of the authors.
The Netherlands went from staunch Calvinism to this in 100 short years. Weeeeee!
Liberals killing themselves; I see no harm.
> There is never any medical reason to keep people under deep barbiturate sedation for lengthy periods. If you want to ease the discomfort of dying, you give them a fentanyl drip.
You’re making the ‘extraordinary claim’ that the entire medical profession is highly ignorant. I know these people: they have loads of unethical desires, such as desegregation of the USA and decolonization of Africa, but they are highly ethical within their sphere of expertise. Are you quite certain any opioids will, alone, work all the way to pain level one zillion, without intolerably painful side effects? In people with a well-developed opioid tolerance?
I’ve heard that committing suicide with opes can be very nasty, while it’s absolutely great with barbituates. I’m not sure, but I think benzos are pretty free of painful side-effects at high doses, like barbs. Obviously at these doses, they may have the side effect of killing you through asphixiation in a state of hypo- or un-consciousness, but that doesn’t hurt. If your case is undoubtedly terminal and you have a month tops, that may not worry you a tenth as much as suffering horrible things and emitting the groans of the damned for hours upon hours.
While many of the patients concerned here may not have wanted euthanasia, I have a hard time believing they weren’t informed that a mega-benzo daze is dangerous, and that they didn’t consent to the treatment. That’s basic informed consent, and I’d be shocked if they weren’t doing informed consent. There’s loads of shit you can experience that you would accept some risk to get major relief from, say a risk to life of 0.5% (if no other relief were available), even if you’re expecting to live another 50 years. God, it doesn’t take all that much pain, especially over days or weeks, for those odds to look mighty good. Now, if you know you only have a month, surely you would accept far, far higher risk to life even if it is not your goal to die.
No, I am making the entirely ordinary and unsurprising claim that when the government wants large numbers of patients murdered to cover up its inability to deliver on promises, they will have no difficulty finding doctors who knowingly and willfully commit murder over and over again while reliably filling out all the required paperwork in triplicate.
In countries where the government has no pressing need to murder patients (countries with a two tier medical system, countries where the government openly admits that it cannot provide all needed medical care for everyone) a doctor will only keep a patient under deep sedation for quite short periods, with a human being continually monitoring the patients breathing the whole time, because it is apt to lead to the patient ceasing to breath.
Deep sedation does not relieve pain, it just stops the patient from making a fuss. Its main legitimate use is for treatments that are deeply humiliating and unpleasant, such colonoscopy, rather than for pain. For pain, use fentanyl.
Being unconscious, or conversationally-incoherent on benzos doesn’t help pain? I’m like 95% sure that being benzo-incoherent will help very considerably (as would tons of booze which is also basically GABAergic though it might be a different GABA-r type), but I’m quite convinced that being unconscious will help quite a lot. However, I definitely admit, that if they don’t practice this in the US on nearly the scale that they do in Holland, you will be on to something very intriguing that should at least be looked at. Though there can still be innocent reasons for differences in medical practice by country.
Alcohol did not enable surgery.
The use of deep sedation on ill patients is characteristic of governments that do not have the balls to say “We cannot afford to treat everyone who urgently needs treatment”.
Supposing it to be legitimate to treat someone who is going to die in this fashion, then we then really need to ask if everyone who gets this treatment is someone who was definitely going to die anyway, or someone who was definitely going to die because the queue for an effective treatment options was too long, and who without this treatment would have hung around in hospital bed for years waiting to get to the front of the queue.
The AMA here clearly implies that opiates cannot take you ‘all the way’ in intractable suffering situations, whether you are in Holland or the USA:
Chicago — When [*]all else fails[*] to control patients’ pain at the end of life, it is appropriate for physicians to sedate such patients to unconsciousness, according to new ethical policy adopted at the AMA Annual Meeting in June.
All else failed – is that a subjective ascertainment? Kind of. I mean, you just ask the patient if he’s still feeling suffering that he cannot bear – or if he’s getting new-seeming unbearable stuff that looks (temporally) like it came from the opiates you’ve just tried ramping up for him. Subjective, but not exactly complicated. The boys over at AMA may not be perfect — I’m pretty sure they do tons of nasty rent-seeking that causes suffering — but I trust them 100% to make the elementary ascertainment, tho subjective, of whether there are lots of cases where opes cannot take you all the way.
Gee, and by sheer coincidence they decided this at exactly the same time as the Democrats start to pass a health scheme that makes it increasingly urgent to clear out hospital beds occupied by very ill people.
Even if you only apply it to people who are genuinely dying, and it eases their passing, it also has the highly convenient side effect of ensuring that they pass one hell of a lot faster, thereby freeing up hospital beds, avoiding the apocalyptic scene of overflowing hospitals so characteristic of governments that glibly promise all necessary health care free of charge for everyone.