Category: Bioethics

Welp, it’s finally happened. Human transmission of avian influenza has been confirmed. The article (and perhaps WHO) are downplaying the significance of this, but other people have been trying to sound the alarm for a while now. This virus is active and mutating, and it’s probably not too long (at least, in mutation terms) before it finds a more effective human to human tranmission means.

Will this be our great flu epidemic? I think that’s still hard to say. But what I do know is that our ability to handle massive epidemics is not good, and there are few plans in place for how to effectively do it. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if the government attempted to quarantine, say, Seattle? Yeah.

Whether we want to admit it or not, another flu pandemic is going to happen, and it’s not as though the virus is going to say “oh, look, they have their heads in the sand! we’ll just ignore them, then…”

When I was younger, schools used to have contests about what you were most likely to be as an adult. And, if you were like me, based on your handwriting you were voted most likely to become a doctor or a teacher. that’s no longer going to fly in Washington – at least not for doctors. Docs have to either very clearly blockprint (write) their prescriptions, or print them out.

As the article notes, this puts pharmacists in an uncomfortable position of having to decide what’s legal and what isn’t. What if the doctor happened to have a nice, strict Catholic school education like my mother, and has the world’s most perfect cursive? What if, god help them, they blockprint like I do? Or they have some smudgy in between?

Of course, the easiest thing is to simply print the prescriptions out, which is precisely what my doctor has done for a few years now; they recently even switched to printing schedule 2 drugs on a specific type of paper. All my doc has to do is print, sign, and hand over. Granted, this probably does make it slightly easier to copy, but I suspect that pharmacists would notice if you suddenly needed an awful lot of a prescription painkiller you’d never taken before. (I know that whenever I get a new pharmacist at Hall Health, I have to go through the whole explaining my medical issues, just because of the medications I receive.)

Overall, I think it’s a great move that should reduce patient death due to misfilled prescriptions. I just think it’d be best if they mandated a target date for all doc offices in the state to move to printed prescriptions – remove the ambiguity and necessity of the pharmacist playing cop. Because that’s not their job, either.

I think that, at this time, just about everyone knows about the legal challenges to lethal injection, and the ruling that they may cause extreme pain and suffering, and thus cannot be administered without certified medical personnel there who can insure that the prisoner is first unconscious before administering further drugs. Of course, at this point no public doctor or nurse is willing to participate, feeling that although they should relieve pain and suffering, they should also not be present to involuntarily end a life. Well, today the New York Times has an article about how suffering could be significantly reduced in executions, without necessitating a medical personnel there. The problem? According to the NYTimes,

At the core of the issue is a debate about which matters more, the comfort of prisoners or that of the people who watch them die. A major obstacle to change is that alternative methods of lethal injection, though they might be easier on inmates, would almost certainly be harder on witnesses and executioners.

Now, as most of you know, I’m a relatively practicing Buddhist, and a firm pacifist. So this next bit might surprise you – but I support the death penalty in certain cases.

I do believe that too many people on death row are there falsely, with bad science or law behind them. But I also believe that there are people there who’ve admitted to their crimes, or for whom the evidence was more than overwhelming. And in general, these people are so heinous, reform appears impossible and I believe it’s in everyone’s best interest if they were humanely euthanized.

The problem I have is threefold: first, the above-mentioned issue of innocence. I would like a system where it’s near-impossible to execute the wrong person, and we don’t have that right now. Secondly, it takes entirely too long to move from sentencing to execution. This isn’t an issue for the ones who can’t be reformed, who appear the same variety of sheer evil 20 years later as they do 2 days later. But this, of course, isn’t always the case – there are murderers who do change; often, they tend to be the ones who need treatment, be it counseling or medicine. Should we then have a clause that if a shrink notes you’ve made significant progress in changing your sentence can be commuted to life in prison? I don’t know – that might place undue burden on shrinks. But we change so much in 20 years; we’re not even the same person, quite literally; our cells have died and reborn and died again almost three times over in 20 years. Multiple biological changes have occured, and that’s not even beginning to consider the mental and emotional ones. And of course, the third objection is that it very well might be inhumane and cruel, causing pain and suffering.

Some people might ask what the problem is what that; after all, the person is being executed. The thing is, I don’t think acknowledging the sometimes need to cull the herd, as it were, I don’t think that culling should be done cruelly. So of course, in a case of irony, it appears that in an effort to make it appear serene and uncruel to the witnesses, the suppposedly more humane method of execution is not necessarily so, and the method that would be more humane would be more discomforting to watch.

We, of course, opt to comfort the witness, and not the person being executed. It makes me wonder, a bit, at our attitude towards death: it’s okay, so long as it’s pretty and serene…? Is this just a manifestation of our general desire to have death be neat and tidy, a further extension of our attempt to sanitize dying? I think most likely, yes. And so the end result, in our desire for neat appearances to comfort our own visige of our death, we take the fast and cruel approach because it’s prettier – a more aesthetic death than the longer, twitchier, and more painless one.

Holy crap, those damn hippies are at it again: San Francisco unveils a universal health plan for residents. According to the Washington Post,

The city would offer health care to any adult resident, regardless of immigration or employment status, under a plan announced Tuesday.

The plan, which still needs be approved by the city’s Board of Supervisors, is aimed at 82,000 uninsured residents who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, said Mayor Gavin Newsom. San Francisco already provides universal health care for children.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, appears with Sandra R. Hernandez, CEO of The San Francisco Foundation, during a news conference, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, in San Francisco. Newsom and other officials unveiled a plan to make San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide health care to all residents. The plan aimed at 85,000 San Franciscans who earn too much to qualify for federally subsidized health care would offer basic preventive care and treatment for catastrophic illnesses. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, appears with Sandra R. Hernandez, CEO of The San Francisco Foundation, during a news conference, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, in San Francisco. Newsom and other officials unveiled a plan to make San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide health care to all residents. The plan aimed at 85,000 San Franciscans who earn too much to qualify for federally subsidized health care would offer basic preventive care and treatment for catastrophic illnesses.

“Rather than lamenting about the fact that we live in a country with 45.8 million Americans that don’t have health insurance … San Francisco is doing something about it,” Newsom said. “San Francisco is moving forward to fulfill its moral obligation.”

This is really awesome. What I would like to see is S.F. release the amount its public hospitals lose every year treating the uninsured – I bet it’ll be much, much more than the proposed $200 million a year this will be costing the city.

And as for the businesses complaining this will put them out of business; you know what? If you can’t afford to treat your employees humanely, and you can’t afford to contribute a whopping $1.60 an hour per employee to guarantee health care for everyone…you have a failed business model and shouldn’t be in business in the first place.