Medical ethicist Maurice Bernstein answers.
Related posts:
- Saviour siblings
- A children’s book is banned for using the word "scrotum"
- The sexually seductive patient
- The ethics of medical blogging
- Ok to hug your patients?
- The art of diagnosis
- Old-school doctors
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 5 comments }
YES
i see no ethical problem at all with withholding scarce medical resources from prisoners.
there is no right to healthcare except in the acute life threatening scenarios. healthcare remains an individual’s responsibility and when you are incarcerated it should remain your responsibility. to argue that incarceration prevents a person from obtaining the means to provide for their healthcare needs flies in the face of the reality that we currently do not assume responsibility for other myriad of individual responsibilites i.e. we do not pay for other personal expenses just because being incarcerated may prevent a prisoner from obtaining monetary resources to pay their bills while they do their time.
prisoners should definately have healthcare access, but at their own expense…same as the rest of us.
mike
What is the right to healthcare? It seems to me that a right is a natural entitlement. Basically, my only real right is not to be interfered with. I have no rights to other people’s stuff, their money, time, expertise. Governments may choose to provide things but they arent rights. If I violate your right to life, you can legitimately resist me, violently if necessary. If I refuse to give you health care, or to care for you in your dotage. Well, it is my choice not to.
In response to Mike, how can a person imprisoned have any control of their own healthcare? Prisoners “are systematically denied the legal powers needed to provide for themselves,…[so] that wardens — are properly charged with a legal duty to make needed medical services available to those in their custody.”
(read my blog for the full argument). ..Maurice.
I had a quick chance to look at Dr. Bernstein’s website comments-many from nursing students-about what pain is-and how it should be treated-or not treated-or how you have to be careful not to make patients addicts-and how we should be using ’safer’ drugs-such as Actiq.
There is no shortage of misguided and misinformed individuals entering into the health care field.
There is some serious lack of proper training going on when nursing students believe that all pain patients should be running around with fentanyl lollipops.
No patient should ever be denied opioids based on fear of possible addiction or regulatory scrutiny [ see; Katzung-Principles of Pharmacology-Lange Medical Publishers-chapter on "Opioids" ]
If you review thw writings of Dr. Benjamin Rich on medical ethics related to pain treatment, along with the writings from Dr. Joranson-Univ. Wisconsin Pain Studies Group, some of these very issues are properly addressed.
There are effective barriers to pain treatment which act-in unison- to deny legitimate pain sufferers their right to obtain these types of medications.
It seems like our current generation of health trainees-both doctors and nurses alike-haven’t managed to overcome these same “Barriers” to any more significant degree than the majority of their forebears.
This is probably the fault of the teachers in the institutions where they are training.
Legal decisions and research papers-=on this subject-have very nicely pointed out that even most members of states medical boards are unable to properly judge the credentials and actions of pain specialists-given the fact that the members of those boards are ignorant as to the issues.
This is why its easy for cops to arrest and prosecute doctors—and why it is easy to see that REAL PAIN PATIENTS will continue to get the ’short end of the stick’ in our society.
I suggest to these students who blog into Bernstein’s site that they look up the above mentioned references-so they can actually learn what’s going on-before they go off ‘waxing philosophical’ on a subject that they not only don’t understand-but where their bloggigs reflect a degree of immaturity inconsistent with the needs of their future patients.
Comments on this entry are closed.