“A profession dedicated to healing the sick has no place in the process of execution.”
Is this true?
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Absolutely true.
The medical profession is defined by it’s ethics–not it’s technical expertise. Either we stand for something beyond our skills or we are mere tradesmen unworthy of being trusted with the power that people necessarily must trust us when they are too sick to protect themselves.
The bloger linked to proposes that this proclamation is just a function of docs being against capital punishment.
I am completely in favor of capital punishment but against physicians participating in the process of the killing. Likewise with nurses. I don’t have a problem with the doctor making a declaration of death but don’t see why it is necessary. It doesn’t take medical school to recognize death.
It is not managed care or government that is destroying the medical profession, it is physicians who are ignorant of what it use to, and still should, mean to be a physician—the things that we are supposed to be “professing”.
Participation in executions could be seen as nothing more than palliative care.
Like patients will terminal conditions, dying might suck, and there could be both physical and emotional suffering. The condemned is going to die. Unlike with terminal other conditions, we know the time, place, and mechanism. It cannot be stopped, he is going to die.
The last person poking him with a needle can be a poorly skilled prison employee, or a skilled provider who wishes to show some compassion. The drugs can be ‘prescribed’ by a dusted off protocol or the prescription can be double-checked by someone who has some actual working knowledge of the drugs being used. The drugs require physical preparation (pentothal must be mixed from a lyophilized power) and drawn into syringes. Delivery systems (IV infusion pumps or other devices) need to be checked for function by someone who uses them every day.
Providing compassionate care for the dying criminal might not be for everyone. People see my practice of hospice care and ask how I can stand the sorrow and misery. My reply is that it would only break my heart if I were competent to provide care for these people and failed to. Same thing with those condemned by the state rather than by disease. It seems unconscionable to let one man suffer to satisfy the Left’s political agenda against capital punishment.
Reading the above, I am starting to understand how the doctors who helped the Nazi’s thought. Scarey.
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