Doctor admits euthanizing patients during Katrina

Originally posted by Discotech

Originally posted by Yummy Freelunch
They killed over 40 people that day. For no reason.

Hmmm and how many would have died had the Doctors not been there at all to assist some of the people ?

I'm sick of society and its self imposed judges who think they know better about a situation they were never involved. Too many people these days think they know better even without experience or knowledge of a situation and enjoy far too much finger pointing at others just to play the "blame game"

Just out of curiosity, where were you ? Did you not come to the aid of these poor innocents who were murdered ? Why didn't YOU do something to help them ?

So you are saying its ok, to kill, yes KILL, these people because the doctors were incovenienced? Because of the guards who said they wouldnt stay at the hospital after 5 pm, the doctors panicked. Well, its your opinion, but Im sure it would change if you would have been one of the patients they killed, or it was your mother, father, wife..etc.

I had no clue they were killing people in the hospital until just the other day..I suppose if I were a psychic I could have known. I have donated money to help victims of Katrina, but they werent letting people in the area so was no way to get to anyone. And if you are trying to blame me for this horrible crime, step back.
Yours is always a juvenile response.

As I stated before, you obviously didnt read the whole story. And it wasnt just the doctors getting these people out, it was guards and flight attendants from the helicopters.
The doctors even tried to stop a man from getting his mother out, and told him "you cant leave", and he stated, "LIKE HELL WE CANT!" and got her out, thankfully..
So side with whoever you want...it will be your own karma, not mine.


[edit on 3-9-2009 by Yummy Freelunch]

Originally posted by Yummy Freelunch
As I stated before, you obviously didnt read the whole story. And it wasn't just the doctors getting these people out, it was guards and flight attendants from the helicopters.
The doctors even tried to stop a man from getting his mother out, and told him "you cant leave", and he stated, "LIKE HELL WE CANT!" and got her out, thankfully..
So side with whoever you want...it will be your own karma, not mine.

Yummy how many times have we seen people post replies to even 1 page articles they didn't read but only read the excerpt in the OP?

This article is 18 pages long and I doubt very many people will read the whole thing. I'm impressed you did and I was skeptical about what you were saying before I read the whole thing, but you are right, they killed some people that didn't need to be killed and I think that's very sad. (I don't know if it's 40 though, 4 for sure and probably more).

There are some excerpts from the article I want to mention here for the people that didn't read it though.
www.nytimes.com...

Today triage is used in accidents and disasters when the number of injured exceeds available resources. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is no consensus on how best to do this. Typically, medical workers try to divvy up care to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There is an ongoing debate about how to do this and what the “greatest good” means. Is it the number of lives saved? Years of life saved? Best “quality” years of life saved? Or something else?

At least nine well-recognized triage systems exist. Most call for people with relatively minor injuries to wait while patients in the worst shape are evacuated or treated. Several call for medical workers to sort the injured into another category: patients who are seen as having little chance of survival given the resources on hand.

In emergency situations, it does make sense to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. I think that was their intent, but their execution failed in several respects. Some of the patients they injected obviously would have died soon anyway , but they did incorrectly assess the survival chances of some other patients who had better chances for survival and injected them anyway. I don't think it was Dr Pou's intent to commit murder and the grand jury acquitted her so apparently they agree. She was trying to ease the suffering of what she thought were terminally ill people but unfortunately some she identified as terminally ill were not, I think that was her biggest mistake.

now this comment by Wynne concerned me a little:
www.nytimes.com...

Wynn described turning to an elderly woman who was unconscious with labored breathing. She then prepared a syringe with morphine and midazolam, pushed it slowly into the woman’s IV line and watched her breathing ease. The woman died a short time later, which didn’t disturb Wynn because she had appeared to be close to death. Wynn told me that at that point all the staff could offer was “comfort, peace and dignity.” She said: “We did the best we could do. It was the right thing to do under the circumstances.”

She added: “But even if it had been euthanasia, it’s not something we don’t really do every day — it just goes under a different name.”

What does she mean they do it every day? I was thinking this was about extreme triage type life or death decisions when the hospital lost power etc.

Thiele has a different memory of what happened. “We covered his face with a towel” until he stopped breathing, Thiele told me.

He says that it took less than a minute for the man to die and that he didn’t suffer. “This was totally against every fiber in my body,” Thiele told me, but he also said he knew what he did was right. “We were abandoned by the government, we were abandoned by Tenet, and clearly nobody was going to take care of these people in their dying moments.” He added, “I did what I would have wanted done to me if the roles were reversed.”

Well if he honestly means that he would want the same thing done to him if the roles were reversed, that seems like the standard of care I'd expect from my doctor. One of the issues I see, is not injecting some of these patients would have resulted in their suffering, making gasping sounds as they fought for life, which I imagine would be a very disturbing thing to have to endure after you've been up for 3 days in a 100+ degree hospital filled with sewage and hearing gunshots at night so you can't sleep etc.

So no doubt mistakes were made and Pou is having to defend against wrongful death lawsuits in civil court even though she was not tried in criminal court. And clearer guidelines are needed to tell medical staff how to proceed in triage situations, and Pou had been active in that area since the disaster.

For people that would criticize the actions of the doctors and nurses, I only hope that if you were put in the shoes of those people in that situation, that you would have made better decisions. Maybe you would have, as clearly mistakes were made and perhaps you would have avoided those mistakes. But don't underestimate the stress they were under and how that same stress might have affected your decision making ability had you been in the same situation. And clearly they were not on a murdering rampage, they were trying to do what they thought was best for their patients at the time though it became clear later that some of their decisions were flawed.

I would like to think I could have made better decisions, but until I'm subjected to that kind of stressful situation going days without sleep with raw sewage, gunshots all around me, stifling stench and temperatures, I can't really say I'm sure my decision making abilities will be as good as they would be under better circumstances.






[edit on 4-9-2009 by Arbitrageur]

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Im so glad there are people like you to speak for us that are not so eloquent sometimes I have come to respect your posts and Id like to add you as a friend if you dont mind.
You said it right from both perspectives..and I only wish I could have portrayed it as such.

Yes, the doctors had an overwhelming task on their hands, and yes, they did euthanize people, like animals..that's what angers me, I suppose.

There were several that could have been saved..some that may have died..but who are we to know?
Do i think they should have been convicted of murder? No..I dont..I dont think they are murderers...but I think what they did was careless..callous, irrational and irresponsible. That might seem a bit much, but these are lives at stake here.

Dont quote me on the number of euthanized, either..but I know when they rounded up the bodies..it was around that number...off the top of my head