medicine

Jail for parents who allowed daughter to die

ho⋅me⋅op⋅a⋅thy:

–noun; the method of treating disease by pseudo-scientific bullshit methods, that often causes a marginally sick person with curable  illnesses or diseases to degrade and become critically or terminally ill; similar to religion  (opposed to LOGIC, SCIENCE, MEDICINE, SANITY, NON-RETARDED-BULLSHIT ).

Jail for parents who allowed daughter to die

A couple who failed to seek medical treatment for their baby daughter, who was severely ill with eczema before an infection killed her, wept in the dock today as they were jailed for her manslaughter.

Thomas Sam, 42, and his wife Manju, 37, were convicted in the NSW Supreme Court over the death of nine-month-old Gloria, with a jury accepting they were guilty of criminal negligence.

Sentencing Thomas Sam to a minimum of six years in jail and Manju Sam to at least four, Justice Peter Johnson said Gloria was subjected to significant pain over an extended period and her parents’ failure to seek proper help for her amounted to cruelty.

“Gloria suffered helplessly and unnecessarily … from a condition that was treatable,” the judge said.

Gloria was happy and healthy for the first four months of her life, but then developed eczema.

The court heard that, despite medical advice to seek specialist treatment, her parents repeatedly failed to make or attend appointments.

Instead, her father – who taught and practised homeopathy – treated her himself.

By the time her weakened immune system succumbed to an infection in May 2002, her black hair had turned white and her body was covered with an oozing rash.

She died three days after being admitted to the Children’s Hospital at Randwick.

Medical experts told the trial that, had she been given medical attention a week earlier, she probably could have been saved.

Justice Johnson said Thomas Sam displayed “an arrogant approach to what he perceived to be the superior benefits of homeopathy compared with conventional medicine”.

The judge said that, while Sam’s wife deferred to her husband, she had “failed the child in her most important duty, with fatal results”.

It was overwhelmingly clear that homeopathy would not suffice in dealing with the severity of Gloria’s condition, Justice Johnson said, and there was a “wide chasm” between her parents’ approach and the action a reasonable parent would have taken in those circumstances.

“The omission of the offenders to seek proper assistance for her may be characterised accurately as cruelty,” he said.

He jailed Thomas Sam for a maximum eight years, and Manju Sam for a maximum five years and four months.

The weeping couple embraced in the dock before they were led into custody.

Survey: Many believe in divine intervention

Survey: Many believe in divine intervention

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — When it comes to saving lives, God trumps doctors for many Americans.

An eye-opening survey reveals widespread belief that divine intervention can revive dying patients. And, researchers said, doctors “need to be prepared to deal with families who are waiting for a miracle.”

More than half of randomly surveyed adults — 57 percent — said God’s intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand that treatment continue.

When asked to imagine their own relatives being gravely ill or injured, nearly 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a hopeless outcome.

“Sensitivity to this belief will promote development of a trusting relationship” with patients and their families, according to researchers. That trust, they said, is needed to help doctors explain objective, overwhelming scientific evidence showing that continued treatment would be worthless.

Pat Loder, a Milford, Michigan, woman whose two young children were killed in a 1991 car crash, said she clung to a belief that God would intervene when things looked hopeless.

“When you’re a parent and you’re standing over the body of your child who you think is dying … you have to have that” belief, Loder said.

While doctors should be prepared to deal with those beliefs, they also shouldn’t “sugarcoat” the truth about a patient’s condition, Loder said.

Being honest in a sensitive way helps family members make excruciating decisions about whether to let dying patients linger, or allow doctors to turn off life-prolonging equipment so that organs can be donated, Loder said.

Loder was driving when a speeding motorcycle slammed into the family’s car. Both children were rushed unconscious to hospitals, and Loder says she believes doctors did everything they could. They were not able to revive her 5-year-old son; soon after her 8-year-old daughter was declared brain dead.

She said her beliefs about divine intervention have changed.

“I have become more of a realist,” she said. “I know that none of us are immune from anything.”

Loder was not involved in the survey, which appears in Monday’s Archives of Surgery.

Religion out of medicine, a new message for Ontario doctors

 Religion out of medicine, a new message for Ontario doctors

Ontario physicians could be stripped of their right to exercise religious or moral conscience if a new set of guidelines is accepted by their regulating body next month, critics say.

Doctors across Canada are now allowed to opt out of such things as prescribing birth control or morning-after pills or doing abortions when it goes against their conscience. Physicians are also allowed to refuse to do referrals in such cases.

But a new draft proposal from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario could change that for doctors in the province.

“I’m really concerned with the new principle that the college is promulgating and that is that doctors do not have the right to be guided in the conduct of the practice by their conscience,” said Joseph Ben-Ami, president of the Centre for Policy Studies, an Ottawa-based think tank. “That’s a sweeping broad principle to establish — and once you’ve established it the field is wide open for further changes.”

For example, he said a doctor might refuse to help a same-sex couple to use reproductive technology to have a child.

“There are a lot of doctors who feel uncomfortable with this and think it’s detrimental to the child’s welfare down the road. The way were reading this draft document is a doctor could be hit with a misconduct” if the new rules are adopted.

Some of the provisions included in the draft document are:

• [A] physician’s responsibility is to place the needs of the patient first, [so] there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical services the require.”

• “Physicians should be aware that decisions to restrict medical services offered … or to end physician-patient relationships that are based on moral or religious belief may contravene the Code and/or constitute professional misconduct.”