On Friday, July 28, 2017 at 9:10:03 AM UTC-4, JNugent wrote:
On 28/07/2017 13:55, Incubus wrote:
On 28/07/2017 13:49, JNugent wrote:
On 24/07/2017 11:46, The Todal wrote:
On 24/07/2017 00:19, abelard wrote:
On Sun, 23 Jul 2017 12:23:43 -0400, "BurfordTJustice"
wrote:

The death panel has spoken!

After US Neurosurgeon Says He Can Treat Charlie Gard, the Baby's UK
Doctors
Still Think He Should Die

Earlier this week, an American neurosurgeon flew to the U.K. to
evaluate
terminally ill baby Charlie Gard after a so-called E.U. "High
Court" ruled
the infant should be allowed to die.

Dr. Michio Hirano spent hours with Charlie and determined his
experimental
therapy could potentially help treat the baby. Charlie suffers from
a rare
genetic condition called mitochondrial depletion syndrome and has
apparently
suffered brain damage.

Dr. Hirano disagrees with British doctors that Charlie has suffered
"irreversible brain damage."

'brain damage' is very vague

and

'irreversible brain damage' is under increasing questioning
especially in the very young...


And every ****wit on the internet, including you, believes that they
can second-guess the decisions of doctors who specialise in these
rare disorders.

Including the one in the USA?

To me, it is absolutely incredible - and quite unacceptable - that the
NHS can decide that a child is going to die and that that is simply that.

The decision - whether via the NHS or the courts, or a combination of
both - that his parents are not to be allowed to seek last-chance or
emergent experimental treatment for him outside the UK (financed
charitable and privately) is a horror story.

Was this in anyone's mind when the NHS was set up?

What about cases where the evidence shows that even if the disease will
be halted, the child will never have a comfortable life?

That could have been argued in the cases of many disabling diseases in
the past.



It's not just that the child would never have any quality of life.
One factor is that this child is suffering. Would you want to go
on living when you need a machine to breath, are fed via a tube,
having seizures, with no experts, not even the Dr who offered the
totally experimental treatment, saying that anything more than
marginal improvement was possible? You are always going to find
some Dr somewhere who will say that they have some experiment that
might improve some disease that 99.9% of the experts say isn't so.
This treatment, IMO, was nothing more than a cruel experiment.
In the end, even that one Dr agreed that the child is already
severely brain damaged, something that his experiment can't
reverse.


I repeat: this power (which I suspect most of us did not know about
until this case) is horrific. The state must not be allowed to exercise
a right to decide that an ill or disabled child must die. I'm sure I
don't need to point out the historical parallel(s).

I'm in the USA, so I don't know your laws there. But at some point,
if a baby is suffering, with no chance of recovery, isn't it child
abuse to let this continue, instead of letting the inevitable happen
now?