Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Most Dangerous Man in the State

When leaving the hospital to take my first son home a few days after his birth I remember my cheeks ached from what must have been a silly grin that had controlled my face since he was born. His mother, Deb Marie, remained in hospital for ‘a few tests’ to determine the cause of the anaemia that had plagued the pregnancy, and then, waiting for a bed in Victoria Hospital’s cancer clinic in London.

The mind has an odd way of letting you smile as you recall happy events of decades past while your gut aches as you remember the rest.

The six months to a year prognosis stretched to 14 years. The hope that was renewed and firmly grasped with each remission or announced ‘breakthrough’ in cancer research was overwhelmed by the days of endless gut-wrenching vomiting that followed each treatment.

The genuine warmth, caring and compassion of the doctors, nurses and technicians couldn’t hide an understandable emotional detachment that comes from treating an often incurable disease with harsh chemotherapy and radiation that makes the patient wish they were dead.

This emotional detachment clearly serves as an essential protection for the mental state of those dealing with disease, mangled bodies and death on a daily basis. It also protects patient autonomy by giving medical practitioners the ability to detach from and accept patients’ decisions to decline the treatment the doctor believes offers hope. Deb Marie’s doctors grudgingly accepted her never regretted insistence to stop their treatments and opt for milder alternatives. It’s impossible to know whether continued conventional treatment would have extended Deb’s life. There is no doubt that taking control of her healthcare vastly improved her satisfaction of living.

Recent events tell us some in the medical community – not all - are losing their ability to detach from patients’ decisions. Courts have been asked to resolve disputes between patients and their families and doctors over whether to force unwanted treatment or continue potentially hopeless medical care to prolong life. Some doctors are even encroaching into their patients’ lives by refusing to treat those whose lifestyles they disapprove of and there is an ever-growing and ominous trend for medical activists to seek laws that impose their views of social hygiene on the rest of us.

The loss of this crucial detachment coupled with the political power of today’s medical community is leading to a dangerous hygienic cleansing of our society. Just as human genetics were used to justify racial hygiene and the genetic cleansing that followed it is our personal choices that have been perverted into the great threat that must to be purged today.

During development of the ‘scientific’ concept that the white race was superior to all others Christopher Willhelm Hufeland warned: ‘If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.’

Sadly, Hufeland’s warning went unheeded then but it does prompt the question today: Which is the greatest threat to a free and caring society - the choices each of us make that have an uncertain or perhaps unforgiving impact on our body or the medical practitioner’s lost detachment and escalating control of our lives?