A stroke recoverer friend in his 60s recently visited a new
GP for the first time.
‘Have you ever considered suicide?’ she asked as she went
through his notes.
‘No’, he replied.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
He was so thrown by her question (and having lost his
ability to react spontaneously anyway through stroke damage) that he did not
reply.
I suggested to him that he should complain to the surgery
and get to the bottom of whether this was professional misconduct or she simply
didn’t explain herself properly.
However he has so many battles to fight on a daily basis, he
has to choose them carefully and is thinking of just requesting a different
doctor in future.
It set me thinking about how not so long ago suicide was considered
‘a sin’ to the point that a suicide could not be buried in consecrated ground,
yet somehow suicide has now become socially acceptable and even touted as ‘a
human right’.
I particularly find it disturbing that this is bound to
affect and influence those who might have challenging lives or health issues but
who don’t necessarily want to die – they just want proper compassionate care
and to be able to trust their health professionals to provide it.
To read that NHS hospitals got a ‘bonus’ for each patient
they put onto the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ to bring their lives to an end (even
if their lives were nowhere near their natural end) is frankly chilling. Some patients
on the LCP have not even been old but cancer sufferers in their 40s and 50s and
many it now transpires were being placed on the LCP without their consent or
their next of kin’s consent.
Moreover, since when did food and fluids come to be termed ‘treatment’ to be withdrawn, rather than basic sustenance required as an essential human right?
What next? A posthumous award to Dr Harold Shipman for his
humanitarian works? It seems to me there is little difference between what he
was doing and what the Liverpool Care Pathway has been doing.
If we have an over-population problem, there must surely be
better ways of solving it than manslaughter at worst and societal coercion for those who've served their economic purpose at best.
