I’m not easily grossed out or nauseated. Heck, I’m on email lists for a half-dozen softball teams and you can only imagine the strange/filthy/nasty things that guys send to each other.
But I read a story about the death panels in the United Kingdom that left me discombobulated. I can’t even begin to describe how I feel.
Here’s the intro of a disturbing report in the Daily Mail.
Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.
And here are some of the horrifying details. Read at your own risk.
One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone. Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’. The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers. …Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. …‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’ …Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children. She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway. …‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die. ‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’
My first reaction is to hope that this story is wildly wrong, filled with exaggerations and lies.
My second reaction (and this is why I got so agitated) is to imagine what it must be like for the parents. They get talked into letting their kids die, which must be agonizing, and then (assuming they stick around) they have to watch them slowly starve to death or die of thirst. Wouldn’t it be better to just give your kid a fatal injection? Setting aside the moral issue of deciding to let a kid die because he’s disabled or something like that, doesn’t simple decency mean that death should be painless rather than agonizing?
My final reaction is to wonder what Paul Krugman would say about this scandalous neglect and mistreatment. During the Obamacare debate, he told us we could ignore stories about what was happening across the ocean, writing that “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.” So I guess starving children don’t qualify as a scare story.
P.S. If you want more horror stories about government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Granting the assumptions here, how would free markets solve this problem? In a free market, if you can’t pay for care, you don’t get it. How many of those parents could afford to pay out of pocket for care necessary to prevent those deaths?
[…] of my favorite economists is Dan Mitchell and recently he noted, “Wow. I guess doctors in the UK don’t have to take the Hippocratic Oath! A society like […]
[…] Particularly since you can’t be sure whether government-run healthcare will kill you accidentally or kill you deliberately. […]
[…] of my favorite economists is Dan Mitchell and recently he noted, “Wow. I guess doctors in the UK don’t have to take the Hippocratic Oath! A society like […]
[…] of my favorite economists is Dan Mitchell and recently he noted, “Wow. I guess doctors in the UK don’t have to take the Hippocratic Oath! A society like […]
[…] also are the result of a deliberate government policy to hasten death. If you think I’m kidding, read this story about children being put on the “Liverpool Care Pathway.” But only if you have a strong […]
[…] are the result of a deliberate government policy to hasten death. If you think I’m kidding, read this story about children being put on the “Liverpool Care Pathway.” But only if you have a strong […]
[…] also are the result of a deliberate government policy to hasten death. If you think I’m kidding, read this story about children being put on the “Liverpool Care Pathway.” But only if you have a strong […]
[…] are the result of a deliberate government policy to hasten death. If you think I’m kidding, read this story about children being put on the “Liverpool Care Pathway.” But only if you have a strong […]
[…] real-life victims of bad government policy in the United Kingdom, particularly if you look at the healthcare system and welfare […]
[…] also get a healthcare system that seemingly prides itself on maltreatment, and a tax system that is more designed to be punitive rather than to generate […]
[…] wonder how Krugman would define a “scare story.” How about starving babies to death, as I wrote about last month? Would he say that’s “false,” or simply not a “scare […]
[…] wonder how Krugman would define a “scare story.” How about starving babies to death, as I wrote about last month? Would he say that’s “false,” or simply not a “scare […]
Did you know that many of the readers of this blog hold a mechanistic view of man. Man is the product not of creation by a personal God like our founding fathers believed but a product of the impersonal chance driven evolutionary process. Dr. Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everette Koop in their film series WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? (on youtube) took the first three episodes to look where a mechanistic view of life logically leads. Morally things we traditionally thought were wrong because of a Christian Consensus now accept. That is why in the first three episodes the series cover 1. Abortion, 2. Infanticide and 3. Youth Euthanasia.
You are right these conclusions can be horrible.
[…] of my favorite economists is Dan Mitchell and recently he noted, “Wow. I guess doctors in the UK don’t have to take the Hippocratic Oath! A society like […]
Longrange:
The British are not subjects, thats a myth because we have the Queen and the Royals. The British are citizens and have been since the Nationality Act of 1948 (confirmed by the Nationality Act of 1981)
[…] isn’t a blog post about Obamacare, though there certainly are enough horror stories from the United Kingdom to make us fearful of government-run […]
[…] isn’t a blog post about Obamacare, though there certainly are enough horror stories from the United Kingdom to make us fearful of government-run […]
[…] told, over and over again, that these are isolated incidents. With the sheer volume of these incidents, it is clear the NHS has (or, more properly, is) a systemic problem. In each […]
Sorry, the original story is based partly on purposefully selective information; and the responses indicate a saddening minsunderstanding of UK healthcare and society in general. Most of our current problems are not to do with socialism, they are to do with the intention dismantling of public service in the interests on enriching a specific group of people. The real, genuine, working NHS is overstretched and has some centres of excellence but also many centres of incompetence – the whole spectrum of experience, almost a lottery, for a whole spectrum of patients. However, on balance it saves lives in more than one way. It never leaves entire families ruined because of medical misfortune, and it did not until the advent of privatisation create multimillionaire general practioners. Sadly, that day has now come.
If I consider my own family, my wife would have died before we had our first child, had it not been for a system which created fully surgically equipped and staffed hospitals at town or local level (many now closed). She would have died on three occasions since; we probably would not have our daughter at all; my parents, even with the private healthcare they paid for, probably wouldn’t have lived to the same old ages or done so in comfort. An injury our son sustained last year would probably have removed all our savings and pensions as he was not in position to be insured against that kind of accident (he was insured for the emergency surgery in a Tunisian – socialist – hospital which meant he kept his leg almost intact). Many of my friends would now be dead, or housebound, or consigned to residential care years if not decades before their time.
I know one young lady whose family simply doesn’t have any wealth, despite being very hard-working people, whose complications in life from birth would have been an intolerable burden in the US system. Here she has been through great difficulties, dozens of operations, but is a great person and inspiration to others. It would indeed be terrible if the so-called Liverpool Care Path (if you want to demonise something, first give it a name!) had resulted in that person not existing because of a consultant’s judgment that physical complications were too great for the baby to be viable. It was good that when the NHS was a complete system, before its destruction in the interests of private enterprise and for-profit ownership, no such decision was made.
We are in Scotland, where the venal commercialisation of national healthcare has been resisted; it hasn’t been sold off, and like many services here is never going to destroy the life of a family. Coastguards, mountain rescue, fire services, paramedics, police, dentistry if you’re lucky, general practica and hospital services even if you’re not – this is the infrastructure of society for which we pay fair taxes, and people for the last 60 years paid taxes to help build. And it’s free, and we support many extras and voluntary services with donations as well. England and Wales do rather worse, the rot of crony capitalism has already cut the heart out of society, and now threatens to remove its brain as well and leave just a calculator in place. Scotland may yet have that to come, if we get independence – it’s been the Scots, over the centuries, who have been both the best socialists and the most ruthless capitalists of all, simultaneously. And the best doctors and surgeons too, back when learning the craft meant murdering the occasional anatomical subject on the way.
I also love many aspects of the US approach, and I know that there are far more privately-funded non-profit charity services than we have (possibly because we have not needed them).
But when arguments come round to say, don’t expect the state to help, learn to help yourselves – I fear that what actually happens is that a wealthy and controlling minority are the ones who end up ‘helping themselves’ by profiting the lives, afflictions, misfortunes and deaths of others.
qlangley — Wrong, this has almost nothing to do with euthanasia and everything to do with socialism.
There are huge pressures within the NHS to contain costs. Dead patients generally incur few additional costs. Marginal patients, otoh, can be EXTREMELY expensive. There’s a simple way to turn the latter into the former using “natural causes” which takes the onus off of those performing the, er, transition.
Remember, it’s not murder when the government does it for the good of the people.
BTW, my friend’s daughter is 15, recovering from a brain tumor, and working on her second million in treatment here in the heartless U.S. system. She would be dead if she lived in the UK.
[…] You can find my inspiration at: Daniel Mitchell […]
If you take time to go to youtube and look at the 46 minute film “Whatever happened to the human race?” (episode 2 on infanticide) by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop then you would see at the 9 minute mark in that film a very moving interview with several of Dr. Koop’s patients who all were born with severe handicaps. Many other experts at the time said the parents should have had these babies put to death.
I wish people would take a look at about 3 minutes of that film and then come back and see if their views on infanticide have changed.
[…] The Sadistic Brutality of England’s Government-Run Healthcare […]
[…] [More] […]
[…] all you need to do is look at the cracking and crumbling UK government healthcare system, the NHS. Cold. Brutal. Sadistic. Inhumane. Calculating. Those words might just be too kind to describe it. Do not doubt this is the way it would have to […]
[…] all you need to do is look at the cracking and crumbling UK government healthcare system, the NHS. Cold. Brutal. Sadistic. Inhumane. Calculating. Those words might just be too kind to describe it. Do not doubt this is the way it would have to […]
Food and water is ordinary care, not a medical intervention. If we refuse to eat or drink and die on account of that refusal, it is suicide not the course of a disease. Similarly, if one is deprived of food or drink and dies on account of that deprivation, it is murder and not death due to disease.
One could make the case that there is no obligation to accept the intubation or an IV, and that these medical interventions can be withdrawn. Even under circumstances where this could be the case one would still have to attempt to provide adequate nutrition and water through normal means, even if more difficult.
The most efficient means to bring an end to life is a bullet in the head – as long as you can contain the spatter. I guess this is out of the question, given England’s gun laws. Perhaps they could redefine a small handgun as a medical device. Surely there’s a reasonable solution here.
“There’s an ancient Japanese practice of harakiri, popularly known as falling on your sword, which is apparently a very simple as well as quick way of causing your own death. All that’s needed is a long sharp knife and knowing where to place it, which I understand is just an inch or two below the navel. Western writers know about this practice, but none are experts. Obviously it’s a bit difficult to get personal experience before writing about it.”
Well, seppuku (the proper term) also requires that someone behead the person shortly after the self-impalement. Not exactly the cleanest of deaths.
Valdemar says,
“For the record, the NHS is something even conservatives here want to keep. This story reminds me of the hilarious one tagged with Stephen Hawking and how some media pundits imagined he’d be euthanised were he British and used the NHS…”
And if he weren’t “Stephen Hawking” and did not have a net worth over 10,000,000 GBP, and if he were instead, Thomas Thompson, Queens Road, Liverpool; How long would it take the NHS to starve him to death?
For your record, American Conservatives aren’t even vaguely similar to your British Conservatives. We are Citizens, they and you are subjects.
[…] Here’s a scary story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dan Mitchell) […]
The real reason you see these stories is to soften you up for active euthanasia: killing kids by starving is gruesome, we should be allowed to make it quick by bashing in their head!
The reason you read these stories is not because the doctors feel guilty: no, they just want more options to kill people.
It really does make me wonder why so many foreigners seem to like quoting a fascism supporting, conservative rag like the Daily Fail. The fact that they outright fabricate half their news, or simply misrepresent it continually, never seems to get in the way of righteous indignation. Here’s an article which shows you what bullshit the Mail is peddling: http://goo.gl/GtgX7
Basically, anyone quoting The Mail might as well quote FOX News as well. They’re about as unbiased and useful as “news” sources.
For the record, the NHS is something even conservatives here want to keep. This story reminds me of the hilarious one tagged with Stephen Hawking and how some media pundits imagined he’d be euthanised were he British and used the NHS…
Terri Schiavo.
” Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.”
We are all terminal, the question is when. Will you wait for the government to decide that for you?
In the comments, several spoke of how starvation / dehydration was a less painful way to die. Self-starvation is a personal choice, the LCP protocols amount to the execution of those considered undesirable to a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy.
Helping yourself to die is a responsible thing to do, when necessary, and does not involve others that may disagree with you, or be forever haunted by helping you do it. That said, simple nitrogen or helium oxygen deprivation is simple and painless, and inexpensive. If you think there may be a need for this process, keep a bottle of one or the other close by. It is difficult to detect nitrogen asphyxiation , and no hospice nurse would investigate further if the death were warranted – those people are saints. Having that decision made by some bureaucrat is simple murder, and I would rather die with guns blazing than me or my family subject to state sanctioned murder.
There will be a special Circle-of-Hell reserved for these “medical professionals”; but to get there, they need to be thrown into the darkest dungeon in the dankest prison that can be found, and given a taste of their own medicine.
As they used to say in “The West”: Get a whip, hangin’s too good for ’em!
This too will be the outcome of Obamacare, but look at the bright side. Sandra Fluke, a graduate of Georgetown Law School, will get free condoms for life.
This really isn’t the 21st Century I was expecting.
In response to qlangley; a government run health care facility slowly starving people to death as per govt. health care policy really is about health care. The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money and when that happens the first thing that is cut out are the little people.
The so called doctors who are murdering, and this is murder, would never allow this standard of care to be inflicted on themselves, their families or their friends.
This does not surprise me at all. I am fortunate to be a healthy person, however I still suffer under the tyranny of the NHS.
Currently I have a gap in my teeth (fortunately not visible, but makes chewing harder) and constant pain in another. I am waiting for an appointment to remove a couple more teeth to resolve the issue.
Some time ago I wanted my impacted wisdom teeth removed, which would have prevented the pain I have suffered. However I was not well-off, and my pay was taxed to pay for the NHS. I could not afford private dentistry because of this tax (over two or three years it adds up!). OK, so I can get my teeth cared for on the NHS, can’t I? Not free, but pretty cheaply.
The only problem was that there was no dentist close by taking new NHS patients since I had moved to the town to take a course and stayed to work. Fine, I could go further. Live more than 3 miles away? They won’t take you on.
So no, I could not get NHS dental treatment at all. Treatment for which I was already paying.
Turned out that I could not get medical treatment either. I was working two jobs part-time, paid when I worked, to make one full-time job with a bit of variety. When I was injured I was told a consultant would see me in six weeks; previous experience suggested the physio I knew he would refer me for would be a three-week wait (pretty good for the NHS). However I could only work an hour or two a day at one job, I could not even try to work the other safely or legally. I could not live on 5-10 hours work a week.
So I had to pay for a private consultation IN AN NHS HOSPITAL (next day of course). Because it was a referral from a private consultation I was not allowed to wait 3 weeks for NHS physiotherapy (another cruelty of the NHS; if you pay for any private treatment NHS care might be withdrawn, at the least it will be delayed further). I had to pay for that too.
The irony? I ended up paying a little over £400 in total (I did not need a long consultation or a lot of physio), and because one of my employers was short-staffed so work was cut back if I was not available, with the nature of my work generating an expensive product (remember we have VAT) using a lot of fuel (fuel duties) the government would have lost about three times that in taxes had I not worked for two months.
My grandma was Liverpooled by the NHS. I would have been, because of birth complications, were this standard of care in place in 1965. I have a graduate degree and a professional license and have never been on the draw and pay my taxes and contribute to society.
[…] https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/the-sadistic-brutality-of-englands-government-run-he… […]
[…] Dan is also morbidly disgusted by what socialized medicine produces. He writes about The Sadistic Brutality of England’s Government-Run Healthcare. […]
Dan,
You have a stronger stomach than I do.
I tried to read this and stopped. It was too wrenching, yet it’s public health policy in Britain, SOP and it’s coming here with apocryphal vengeance.
My final reaction is to wonder what Paul Krugman would say about this scandalous neglect and mistreatment.
Comment: When people and especially liberals (er, now “progressives”) think that government should be called upon to address a need, they only envision an efficient program staffed with competent and efficient employees who above all care deeply about solving the problem. They are also frugal and very respectful of the rights of all citizens, with whom the frequently consult.
When the government bureaucracy really starts to operate and utter fails in its mission, is staffed with clumsy and brutish employees whose main concern is getting a union and when the next coffee break is, Krugman’s of the world are slackjawed. Obviously, this agency was under-funded and needs more “resources”, or maybe it just doesn’t have enough authority.
The Krugman’s of the world can never envision how such a function could possibly be performed in a free market, especially when government was how the free market was destroyed to begin with.
And thus we slouch toward socialist tyranny.
My husband’s 80 year-old aunt was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her surgery date was scheduled for six months later. Her niece who was a PA saw the schedule and moved her up. During surgery, they ‘accidentally’ cut a bit out of her small intestine. After that they disconnected her IV’s in the middle of the night. They then put her on a chair at the end of her bed in her hospital gown, opened the window and left her there all night (in March). After this, her bed broke and they refused to give her a new one. She developed a bed sore on her backside and they taped over her anus so it would get infected. Her children finally removed her from the hospital to save her life. This is the NHS in Canvey Island, England.
[…] The Sadistic Brutality of England’s Government-Run Healthcare « International Liberty. […]
The key point in this story is this practice of passive euthanasia is being applied to “severely disabled newborn babies”. What does that mean? Well, it doesn’t say “terminally ill”. It doesn’t say “in agonizing pain due”. It just says “severely disabled”. Does that mean Down syndrome? Or cerebral palsy? If they have to kill the babies by withholding food and water, then certainly their disabilities are not life threatening. Just inconvenient to the caregives and potentially expensive to the government. Is that a good reason to kill people?
Hara-kiri is anything but a painless way to die. The point was to perform a final demonstration of one’s bravery. What made it painless was the duly-appointed second with a sword standing immediately behind the victim, who would instantly decapitate him if the act was performed correctly. Otherwise, the victim was left to die unattended, a process which, as pointed out above, could take a day or more of agony. (Bear in mind that for most of human history, a stomach wound meant agonizing, unproven table death).
Similar to what everyone will suffer under government-controlled health rationing, which is, after all, the point.
crisbd, harakiri (seppuku) is not a humane way to day; it is essentially self-disembowelment, and it is excruciatingly painful. Traditionally, it was practiced only by samurai, either as punishment or as a way of proving how far they would go to redeem tainted honor.
Skipping over irrelevant details of history, in most cases, the person committing seppuku would have a “second” whose job was to decapitate the first. The timing of the decapitation would vary, but it was almost always quick, so that the pain would not drive the dying samurai to disgrace himself by crying out. In contrast, women of the warrior class would generally commit suicide by driving a knife upwards from under their chin. I don’t know that that is particularly humane, either, but it reduces the chance of prolonged agony.
where is the rage from the citizens in all this?
that is the ultimate question. This is also why I will not travel to England given the chance for vacation (work might be necessary)
“…and death will come soon enough.” Indeed it will. But I watched my mother die a hideous death of cancer, which no analgesic could touch, and it took her a year longer than it ought to have. Her oncologist didn’t know what to do. She was too strong.
I have had pain owing to intestinal blockage so great that other patients in the ER were themselves shooing me toward the front of the line. The pain was such that they shut the door in the overflow room, and the ER doc came in with 4 grains of morphine. Absent that, every single second was such agony that there was no past, and no future, and all was protracted into eternity. I could understand at that moment suicide. Utterly.
You cannot know the terrible immediacy of that doubling pain, the contractions, the screaming that you cannot control. Until you’ve been there and I’ve had other pain.
Hara Kiri can be a fast way to die but it was customary for an officer who had lost so much face that he had to kill himself to have his best friend with him. The man would kneel on a matt, and then insert the knife, and rip up. If he didn’t do it his friend would finish him off.
One Japanese general in WWII botched his suicide but forbad his friend to grant him the Happy Dispatch. It took him over a day to die.
The best way of death is peritonitis. I’ve had it. You feel like you have the flu, and then you pass out. I came to after five weeks in a coma, and more in ICU, and evidently was astonishingly lucky to have done so. But you just feel like the flu. That’s it. You go to sleep. That’s it.
I highly recommend it.
I’m obviously not a fan of government run healthcare and pathways to death decided by majoritarian rule in a polling booth.
That aside, there are many medical questions that come to mind. Is death from kidney failure etc. assumed to be less agonizing than starvation? Why so? Or does it simply seem so to external observers?
Most people do not like to think of these things, and I myself don’t have the answers to these questions. But one of the last things I would want is for the majority to provide the answers, AND impose them through the democratic process. Or, as Hillary Clinton would say: “This is the village. This is how we die. The pathway is mandatory, the approach must be uniform to be fair”.
The killing of nobodies is typical of all of human history. It has generally occurred as part of evil religions. Progressivism is a modern example of an evil religion.
[…] […]
Thank you, Democrats, for voting for that… but it’s okay, ’cause you done got a “free” phone out of it, eh?
Looks like it is time for the Brits to begin a shooting revolution to take their country back from the sick socialists who have taken it over.
Too bad there are so many foolish Americans that have put us on the same path- except they (the socialists) have yet to turn us into a nation of disarmed wusses. This is why gun control is the ultimate evil- worse than almost everything else, because without arms, a government can do anything to us.
“Wouldn’t it be better to just give your kid a fatal injection? Setting aside the moral issue of deciding to let a kid die because he’s disabled or something like that, doesn’t simple decency mean that death should be painless rather than agonizing?”
When it becomes painless, I imagine it’ll be done more often. A LOT more often.
Wow. I guess doctors in the UK don’t have to take the Hippocratic Oath!
A society like this is not going to last very long at all. The rot is pervasive and terminal.
This is routinely being done on older patients. The new, extra outrageous part is the children. Not that this is somehow innovative: it’s merely an updated version of what a “physician” named Hermann Pfannmüller came up with first http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Pfannm%C3%BCller
Behold the truly hideous endgame of state-run medicine.
Reblogged this on Spin, strangeness, and charm and commented:
At the risk of going full Godwin, this is an updated version of Pfannmüller’s method during the Third Reich: http://www.holocaust-history.org/lifton/LiftonT062.shtml
Behold the truly hideous endgame of state-run medicine.
If someone is truly terminal, it should be no great hardship to give them food and water. Ordinary care does not cost much and does not take that much effort. There is no need to accelerate death. It will come soon enough.
Mitchell asks, “Wouldn’t it be better to just give your kid a fatal injection?”
They would certainly suffer less! They shoot horses, don’t they?
Oh! That doesn’t come out right. Are humans less important than horses? Well — yeah, at least to them.
This is not even an expose. I read an article about old people being murdered by the same system / program six months ago. A doctor declared them terminal and sent them over there to be killed… didn’t even matter that some are not terminal, don’t want to die, et cetera… Doesn’t look like anything has been done since that article.
I find this very sickening. If this is the path Obama is on I see a war starting. Could anyone watch their parent or child go through this and remain sane. I could not. Governments are to corrupt and to powerful to have the ability to do this to anyone. This is population control, and creating the perfect society that disabled and disfigured etc are not allowed. The government just dresses up this horrid decision for families. Starving people to death is inhuman and there is no excuse for doing this.
Death Panels, Anyone?
Europe is far more hierarchical than the U.S. (though that is changing – see us bow down before the TSA).
There is a deference towards authority that is almost subservient; the people in charge routinely use that deference to impose decisions that should be fought literally to the death (how can a parent watch a child starve or die of thirst?).
There’s an ancient Japanese practice of harakiri, popularly known as falling on your sword, which is apparently a very simple as well as quick way of causing your own death. All that’s needed is a long sharp knife and knowing where to place it, which I understand is just an inch or two below the navel. Western writers know about this practice, but none are experts. Obviously it’s a bit difficult to get personal experience before writing about it.
Some say it’s the most humane way to die, I’ve read that it causes instantaneous death with seemingly no pain. Might be the solution for many people who have had enough of this life, but I wonder if it would work the same for a suicide, the context is totally different…
Second para above should begin:
When someone is dying and/or in pain
Dan, this doesn’t really relate to government run healthcare – of which I am no defender – it is because of the cruel laws England has relating to euthanasia, which are pretty much identical to those in most US states. This is an area where libertarians such as you and I part company with conservatives, and sometimes find that liberals are our allies.
When someone is dying and/or there are only two legal ways they can seek to accelerate their own death with the assistance of medical professionals. One is to request a dual-effect treatment: something which has a medical benefit, such as pain control, but which also shortens life. It is perfectly legal for someone in treatable pain to request and receive an overdose of morphine. Someone in untreatable pain, or suffering from quiet humiliations such as incontinence, cannot legally be given morphine. People can, however, refuse treatments, including artificial nutrition and hydration. This means that for some people the only legal way to shorten their lives is to starve themselves slowly to death. They cannot seek a quick and painless injection.
The result is that these methods of killing people have become institutionalised in hospitals as somehow the best way of doing things, even though they are monstrously cruel. You would be prosecuted for doing the same thing to your dog.