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Health Care

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Will We Starve Dementia Patients in Slow Motion?

Moves are afoot in bioethics to require caregivers to withhold food and water by mouth from a patient made incompetent by dementia if that patient, while compos mentis, has signed such a request — and even if the patient willingly eats, enjoys meals, or asks for food. It is sometimes called “voluntary stop eating and drinking [VSED] by advance directive,” in the parlance.

I have frequently criticized VSED by directive as inhumane to the patient, cruel to caregivers (as it forces them to starve people to death), and designed to open the door to lethally jabbing those with advanced dementia as the less onerous alternative to their being made to starve to death.

Now, as supposedly some form of compromise, there is a proposal on the table to barely feed — i.e., malnourish — dementia patients who have previously signed such a directive. From, “Mr. Smith Has No Mealtimes,” published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (citations omitted):

Minimal Comfort Feeding (MCF)…is the provision of only enough oral nutrition and hydration to ensure comfort. With MCF, eating and drinking is not scheduled; rather, caretakers offer food and liquids only in response to signs of hunger and thirst. Patients are neither wakened for regular mealtimes nor encouraged to eat or drink. Instead, they are offered frequent, fastidious mouth care, continued social contact, therapeutic touch, sensory distraction, and medications to relieve distress associated with apparent thirst or hunger before being provided with minimal amounts of liquid or food.

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Preparing for plastic surgery. Doctor's hands takes scalpel on blue background with surgical tools top view

Trump Protects Gender-Dysphoric Children from the Mutilation of “Gender-Affirming Care”

The execrable gender ideologue Admiral Rachel Levine is no longer in government. That’s great news in the long run for children with gender dysphoria, because the new administration wants to actually protect these disturbed minors. Accordingly, President Trump today signed an executive order protecting such children from being subjected to often irreparable body-altering “gender-affirming care.” From the order, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation:”

Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.

Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.

Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.

Excellent.

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Transgender Day and LGBT pride month, LGBTQ+ or LGBTQIA+ concept. Doctor holding blue, pink and white heart shape for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Pansexual community

New England Journal of Medicine Publishes Screed Defending “Gender-Affirming Care”

The American medical establishment remains radically committed to the misnamed “gender-affirming care” model, refusing to even consider following the examples of the U.K., Sweden, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, France, Norway, and others whose health ministries have hit the brakes hard on providing puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries to gender dysphoric children.

Example: The current New England Journal of Medicine published a “Perspectives” screed attacking the Cass Review — widely respected for its thorough investigation of the lack of significant data supporting puberty blocking of gender dysphoric children. From “The Future of Gender Affirming Care“:

Our concern here is that the Review transgresses medical law, policy, and practice, which puts it at odds with all mainstream U.S. expert guidelines. The report deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States, where it has been invoked frequently, it would have violated federal law because the authors failed to adhere to legal requirements protecting the integrity of the scientific process.

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hand in jail

New England Journal of Medicine Article: Free Sex-Change Surgeries for Prisoners!

Fresh off publishing an unsubstantial attack on the Cass Review that recommended against puberty blockers for gender dysphoric youth, the New England Journal of Medicine offers an advocacy piece demanding that prisoners claiming to be transgender be given free “transition surgeries.” From “Gender-Affirming Surgical Care in Carceral Settings“: Several U.S. courts have held that access to gender-affirming care during incarceration is a trans person’s right. This conclusion is reflected in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) clinical guidance, which governs clinical care provision within federal carceral facilities, which house an estimated 1200 trans people. The BOP, whose guidance often sets the standard for health care delivery in state and local carceral facilities, recommends provision of gender-affirming care during incarceration, including Read More ›

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Patients waiting for an appointment in the hospital corridor

Canada’s Socialized Health-Care Culture of Death: 15,000-plus Die Awaiting Care; 15,000-plus Euthanized

What a debacle. More than 15,000 people died in Canada in one year because they couldn’t access care in the country’s collapsing socialized health-care system. From the Toronto Sun story: Close to 15,500 people died waiting for health care in Canada between April 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, according to data compiled by SecondStreet.org via Freedom to Information Act requests across the country. However, SecondStreet.org says the exact number of 15,474 is incomplete as Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador don’t track the problem and Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries — not diagnostic scans. SecondStreet.org says if it extrapolates the unknown data, then an estimated 28,077 patients died last year Read More ›

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Military and border guards with weapons stand along the border with barbed wire, guarding the border from illegal immigrants. Texas and Mexico Emigration Crisis

Medical Journal Articles Urge Same Health Care Coverage for Illegal Aliens as Citizens

The latest New England Journal of Medicine contains two advocacy articles that essentially argue that the country should provide health care for illegal immigrants, no questions asked. The first, discusses the 1.1 million elderly people with no legal right to be here, who as a result, do not qualify for Medicare or federal Medicaid funding, which the authors call “dual ineligibility.” The article argues that these illegal residents should be covered by Medicare if they paid taxes, but realizing that is a political nonstarter, urge a combination of strategies. These range from states authorizing payments under Medicaid, to funding community health centers, to illegal elders being covered by their legal adult children’s health insurance. But what the authors really want Read More ›

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a doctor in gloves vaccinates a teenage girl

Basta! Italy’s National Bioethics Committee Urges Blocking Puberty Blockers

The tide is really turning against the gender ideologues who advocate experimenting on the bodies of children as a supposedly “medically necessary” treatment. Now, Italy’s National Bioethics Committee has recommended substantially ending the use of puberty-blocking drugs as a “treatment” for childhood gender confusion. From the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine’s press release: Excellent. If the government follows the advice of its bioethics commission, Italy will join a burgeoning list of countries — which includes the U.K., France, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, and Denmark actively taking steps to end the madness. Once the execrable Admiral Levine is out of office as Trump reenters the presidency, I expect the U.S. to follow suit. That will leave the American medical establishment and a short Read More ›

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Cute piglet portrait in veterinarian hands, Close up eyes of swine in the farm. Hugging a pig.

Pig-to-Human Kidney Transplant Offers Hope — and an Ethical Solution

With so many people on the organ transplant waiting list, the ethics of organ donation have begun to buckle. These proposals are not only unethical, in my opinion; in some cases they also treat donors as objects rather than subjects. Each and any of them could undermine the public’s already thin trust in the organ transplant system, which would be a catastrophe. But an ethical way forward has also been researched assiduously, and it is beginning to bear fruit: xenotransplantation, that is, the use of pigs’ organs, genetically altered to be more compatible with humans. Early experiments offer cause for optimism. Recently, a woman who was dying of kidney failure received a pig kidney, and she seems to be doing well. Read More ›

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African American slaves family or group of black slaves. representing five generations all born on the plantation history concept of slavery

Yale Historian writes in “The Lancet” That “Slavery Is at the Bottom of Everything”

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom”: We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh? Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny: Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment Read More ›

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Image by killbyte@flickr at Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terri_Schiavo_protest.jpg

The Media Still Can’t Get Facts about Terri Schiavo Right

Terri Schiavo was cruelly dehydrated to death almost 20 years ago, and the media still can’t get the facts right. Terri’s case has come up again in media stories discussing the nomination of former congressman Dr. David Weldon to head the CDC. As usual, there are misreporting and wrongful implications when Terri’s case is discussed. Read More ›