60,000 patients put on death pathway without being told but minister still says controversial end-of

My wifes grandmother was put on this and it took her A WEEK to die.

A week with no food, water, or medication to make her more comfortable.

Near the end there was a very strong smell in the room, the nurses said it was her kidneys failing.

How is this humane, if you treat your pet dog in this manner "to be kind and let it die" because it was ill, you'd be in court.

But it's okay for the plebs?

This is about people living longer and trying to find a dignified way in which people pass away. Hospitals in the uk are full of very frail old people, who are being kept alive by the miracles of modern medicine. If these old folks come down with something or catch something. It is much harder to keep them alive than a young healthy person. Yet the doctors and nurses will do all they can to keep people alive. At some point, there is nothing they can do.

You could keep that elderly person alive, while they lose all their major functions and have organ failure, but is that what you would want.

I know when my time comes I would like the dignitas option that they have in Switzerland. But to assist the death of someone in this country is called murder. To me it is less humane to keep people alive, when they are probably dead already. For who's purpose are we keeping the dying alive?

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Explanation: St*rred!

I will be very blunt here ... it will seem obscure and will make no sense to most.

E = M C ^2

Everything is just 'patterns' ... our ownselves included!

Now if there is an afterlife ... these bodies aka fleshy trappings, are purely vehicles for our soul!

So if we 3d print a 'person' from the atomic level up [aka nanotechnology] ... it is merely a case of the soul re-entering into a 'familiar' vehicle and taking off again ... metaphorically speaking using the analogy of a pilot and their vehicular extended 'bodies'.

Or if there is no such afterlife ... then we would be souless robots and so when we 'clone' somebody down to the very exact synaptic connections they possess currently ... which would require some mapping ... when we 'turn them on' we should expect to notice no difference in that personal profiled personality and attitude + temperments and interactions.

The same OS and the same kind of hardware ... acts the same ... therefore is the same.

Personal Disclosure: If my fellow members wanted a horror story ... I have just provided one!

What is the meaning of death when sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ... aka acts of God, that can by miracle ... recreate/resurrect us?

Thank you OP for bringing this up. I have followed the news articles about LCP during the autumn and are just apalled about this.

My mother died of cancer 5 years ago and she was put on a similar care (I live in Sweden), no food or drink, only painkillers. Even if she couldn´t speak, the nurses told us that she had to ask HER SELF for water which she couldn´t. We were told to not interfer and that we were a nuisance to them. Here it is quite well-known that patients gets morphine, until the dose in their body are lethal. So it is indeed a kind of murder.

So all of you who think this is a "human" care, you can´t imagine how it is to be in this situation your selves. Nothing can justify this.

Please read the articles about this, even if they are on Daily mail. They do tell about real people.

And if you thought the LCP is only for adults, read this: Children on LCP

A quote from good ole uncle Joe Stalin,' one death is a tragedy, a million is just a number' yep, right on ole boy.

Calling it what it is: murder. These people don't die from not eating, they are killed by dehydration. Their families should be taking these people out of the hospital, hydrating them, and letting them die naturally or with a little morphine help from a friendly doctor. To subject them to this horror at the end of a long line of suffering is cruel, inhumane, and frees up the beds for the next corpse-in-waiting.

Good thread, thanks for putting this important subject before ATS.

Originally posted by Aleister
Calling it what it is: murder. These people don't die from not eating, they are killed by dehydration. Their families should be taking these people out of the hospital, hydrating them, and letting them die naturally or with a little morphine help from a friendly doctor. To subject them to this horror at the end of a long line of suffering is cruel, inhumane, and frees up the beds for the next corpse-in-waiting.

Good thread, thanks for putting this important subject before ATS.

I can agree to a point with this. Is it murder for $$$ ? Are the EOL facilities reaping profits? Is this ethical?

Just have a look at the hoops one has to jump through (in the U.S.) to have a 'Do Not Resuscitate' order in place.
In the medical field it does not take long to bankrupt the average family when a illness or tragedy strikes.

It should be stressed that, in the United States, an advance directive or living will is not sufficient to ensure a patient is treated under the DNR protocol, even if it is his wish, as neither an advance directive nor a living will is a legally binding document. It is also the case that the wishes expressed in an advance directive or living will are not binding.

Do Not Resuscitate

It's a tough issue that needs to have a lot of weight placed on any decision IMHO.
Agreed - good thread OP.

Well if Obamacare is put into full effect, I'm sure we will have this same type of deal in the States. Death panels, premies killed if under a certain weight like in UK, rapid onslaught of death to those with slim chances of recovery.

reply to post by dominicus


This doesn't make sense, once again someone rather confused, thinking the US health care system is superior to the British system. This "type of deal" is the entire basis of the US system.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
60...ahem...Thousand?? I cannot grasp the logic to justify this. There are people sitting in prison right now in our nation and will be there for life. They've killed maybe 1 or 2 people. The worst serial killers? Maybe a couple dozen that I know of for U.S. "records". 60,000? I guess when the numbers become that large, they aren't lives anymore. They're statistics.

You know what always leaves me with a burning curiosity? These people who talk up the barbaric "protocol" I've heard described here? How content and accepting will they be when that day comes that they are told it's their turn to die from a lack of food and water? I wonder...will they be as stoic in their own fate as they seem to be in sending so many others? Somehow I rather doubt that'll be the case but who knows. They may be that cold, even to themselves?

Reminds me of a quote by Stalin.
"One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic."

I think this is awful! There are a lot more humane ways to let a person pass and helping them starve isn't one of them..

However you choose to spin it, the withdrawal of food and water is murder.

I, for the first time in my life, am ashamed to be British.

I'm sorry,but if the lcp did not exist the Daily Mail would be full of stories about how cruel it is to keep the dying alive, despite organ failure loss of function to the brain and basically living on a machine. How long would we keep these people alive. How long should they remain in hospital? We probably have the tech to keep the dying alive for a long time, but there's only so much you can do once the dying process has begun.

The doctors and nurses people are describing as murderers are some of the most caring and hard working people in our society Having witnessed the tireless effort of doctors and nurses to try and save my frail 85 year old grand mother. Their is only so much they can do. It's offensive to think they are callously murdering the elderly.

Originally posted by BMorris
However you choose to spin it, the withdrawal of food and water is murder.

I, for the first time in my life, am ashamed to be British.

What happens if the administering of food and water kills the patient?

reply to post by woodwardjnr


They are. Sorry.

My mother was a nurse before she died, ironically, of cancer. She would be turning in her grave to hear that the patients are being denied water and food.

Its one thing to deny them life preserving drugs when they have no quality or dignity of life, I could understand and accept an argument for that.

But to deny them food, and water? Have you ever gone thirsty or hungry? Its not exactly comfortable.

I am sorry, but I cannot accept them denying access to food and water. Its a step too far.

reply to post by BMorris


If you have organ failure and are given water or food then you don't have the ability to swallow or process the food, your kidneys will have packed up and in effect you are just prolonging a painful death or at worse choking the patient to death. The most humane thing would be to allow a lethal dose of morphine, but that is considered murder, while prolonging a painful death is considered moral.

I dont know to what degree is this true or distorted, but some of these stories are outrageous if they are real. Anyway, this is why legal euthanasia is so important. Modern medicine wont let anyone go easily, and in my opinion you either care for the patient 100 %, or you put them to sleep humanely.

Death is process, we all will inevitably do it. What is on the other side surly trumps what we call life here in the physical realm or spirit prison. But what we all want is respect and to be treated like the sentinel beings that we truly are. Money should not dictate what your life is worth, but sadly that is the case. We're all the same powerful spirits, lets start treating each other like that...

Everybody is missing the point re Obamacare.

We will NOT have death panels.

Instead we have 50 million young people forced to pay into the system.

The system then uses the money so that when people are dying, the money goes to the hospitals and drug companies to keep them alive, increasing sales.

If you deliberately give someone an overdose of a drug like morphine, you know it's going to kill them, and that's murder.

If you deliberately deny someone food, water, and/or the medicine that's keeping them alive, you know it's going to kill them, but that's called "being humane?"

The process may be different, but the outcome is the same.

You know in advance what the outcome will be.

I do not see how you can say one is murder and the other is healthcare.

If the intention, i.e. the end goal, is to deny that person of life, then the first option is the best and most humane way - for them to die quickly and without suffering.

It's an argument over semantics and really I believe the only person who should be able to make that choice is the patient themselves.

Doctors are NOT all knowing, or even capable of rational thinking in some cases.

They're just people like you & I, it's not their choice to make.

ehy are they allowed to profit. the citezens of the uk need to throw these fools in the tower and put them on the same pathway as william wallace during his stay there?

reply to post by ItDepends


I didn't think I had back-peddled at all really...

I merely acknowledge that they way society is given information can be controlled to mitigate or exacerbate an emotional reaction to the facts. And if it can be done it is not deniable that it should be scrutinized.

Truth is, there are too many non-human (meaning commercial/corporate) interests to deny that some have a stake in maintaining the status quo of offering, as a service, the prolongation of life because we want it to continue.

There is a difference however, between providing such a service... and 'saying' that you are. Especially when the driver for the actual 'hard' decision is a systematized procedural protocol... as in a "plan" which will be applied cookie-cutter style to every patient nearing death.

I promise you this much... should this practice continue as a matter of "policy" we will no longer even hear about "miraculous" cures and "amazing" recoveries.... because once you get to the point of being introduced to the end of life care "plan" your fate is dictated by process... into which you have no input, and just like capital punishment... for which there is no meaningful redress.

The certainty of death for all humans is being leveraged against us as "fear." Especially for those who can imagine themselves in a situation like those of these sorry patients who some statistical experts have decided would be a loosing bet to invest in.

The next meme to be looked for is the "quality of life" meme; as if one person could be the arbiter of what is an acceptable quality of life on behalf of someone they don't know, and are professionally committed to be clinically distant from.

But the real problem is, whether we disguise it behind a veil of an image of "honorable physicians" or the cold, and sadly more likely, spreadsheet formula removing all guilt from the enthusiastic supporters of this tail end of eugenics, people are being 'cut loose from this mortal coil,' and for some - one or two 'mistakes' should not taint the idea of such a practice.... I feel it does.