Report: Doctors killed patients in New Orleans

[pegkerr]

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals.

Is this a reputable news source? Has anyone read anything about this in U.S./other authoritative coverage?

Because I gotta believe, if this is true, that this is going to be a big deal for the "compassionate conservative" pro-life right wing, the ones who rode into town to make Terri Schiavo's last days such a circus.

This is huge. This has got to shock even Bush supporters. Unless the Bushwackers find some way to pin this on the liberals (perhaps they'll try to spin it that the doctor was one of those cowardly left wing "culture-of-death" types? Or spin it that if the doctor had believed in the right to bear arms like a true red-blooded American should, she would have stayed at the hospital to defend her patients at gunpoint, instead of fleeing to save her own "cowardly" neck?)

Comments

[pinguthegreek.livejournal.com]

It is and it isn't a reliable source. It is a newspaper reputed in this country for a right wing bias. I read this story on Sunday.

Having said that they are not reputed for being a serious paper, I suspect they could not run such a story without certainty that there was something to it. If others investigated, I would be more willing to give it credence.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

The Mail is not the world's most reliable news source. It could be true -- some thing in the Mail are true -- but unless it turns up from another more credible outlet (and not just quoting the original article), I'd treat it as a rumour.

[megd.livejournal.com]

I doubt the validity. It may be one doctor acting alone, but I doubt it being too wide spread without any mention until now.

[pameladean]

Even one doctor acting alone should cause a huge uproar among the people who threw a complete hysterical fit about one single woman whose family squabble they felt entitled to butt into. If those people have any moral consistency, anyway.

P.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Er.

::scratches head::

Was there something I missed that makes you think that they /do/ have any moral consistency? I don't mean to be cynical or anything, it's just that I'm, well, cynical.

[pameladean]

No, of course not. But they pretend to, or think they do, who knows what goes on in their horrid heads, and sometimes it just drives me nuts.

P.

[dreamingcrow.livejournal.com]

I've seen it in a few places and some of them seemed reasonably reliable.

Check Google News Search.

[silme.livejournal.com]

Unless there's verification from elsewhere, I'd treat it as a rumour. The Mail sometimes runs reliable stories, but not always. It also tends to be very far to the right, so much so that when one was delivered to us instead of our usual Guardian, my husband picked it up very gingerly by one corner, barely touching his flesh to it.

In trying to verify the article, I just googled William "Forest" McQueen and found this BBC report, which mentions such a Mr. McQueen of Abitas Springs, who is married to a British woman. Interesting how the Mail article says nothing about that. How many William "Forest" McQueens might there be in Abitas Springs?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4220656.stm That was from the 6th. The next day, the Telegraph, which is a conservative paper in terms of politics but is far more reliable in terms of reporting, also mentions Williams Forest McQueen of Abita Springs being missing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/07/wkat107.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/09/07/ixnewstop.html

The Mirror ran a similar story to that in the Mail. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=15958322&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=hurricane-doc-admits--we-had-to-kill-our-patients--name_page.html
Again, however, the Mirror is a tabloid. Although more to the left in its politics, it isn't necessarily reliable. I'm noting that it's only the tabloids running this story right now, which I find interesting. Okay, I've also found it in an Australian paper (the Telegraph -- not to be confused with the one in the UK), but I don't know its reputation.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

I think, too, the actual quotations from the doctor were somewhat ambiguous. What she seems to have actually said (if she did say it) is that some of the clearly terminal patients were given high doses of morphine which _may_ have slightly hastened already-impending deaths, because it was a way of keeping them comfortable in gruelling circumstances. Which is, in all honesty, not that distant from things that happen in normal medical practice.

The emphasis on the "looters and rapists" is coming not so much from the doctor as from the Mail, and I do suspect that a certain number of the "looting and raping" stories are manifestations of white-people hysteria; a lot of them prove, on examination, to be about things that happened to "somebody I heard about", not something anyone actually saw themselves.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

This sounds like an interview with a doc who was giving as much pain meds as possible to patients, but wasn't sure whether that sped up the process -- and then the story was spun according to Boston-Herald-esque lines.

A lot of doctors were talking about how they were attempting to treat their patients as best they could, but had no means of testing liver levels or anything else as they medicated them, so it was all by guess and by god(s). Plus, with no power, they couldn't maintain constant (electrically-monitored) drips, and they were running out of meds, so were probably down to the best meds they could use. All that state-of-the-art medicine going suddenly back to the early 20th century -- and doctors aren't really trained for that any more.

Did you see the various articles about the nursing home where 45 dead were found? There, at least, the staff kept on trying to save them (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4240132.stm), but most of the people who died couldn't cope with the 106 degree temps in the hospital.

[althea_valara]

This is being talked about on a forum I visit. Most of the posters there are waiting for a more reliable source.

One of the posters in that thread (sndrake) has a vested interest in this as he is a research analyst for Not Dead Yet, an activist group against euthanasia and assisted suicide.

[peppersghost.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that this happened. I can also imagine that, if true, it will flummox the Republicans. They've never shown much of an ability to grasp the complexities of Real Life.

[wilhelmina-d.livejournal.com]

Life is imitating art here. Have you ever heard Leslie Fish's Firestorm album? The song that I am talking about is "The Day It Fell Apart".

Rather than reprinting here I have the lyrics up on my personal homepage. Lyrics to The Day It Fell Apart (http://home.earthlink.net/~wilhelmina_d/firestorm.html#dayitfellapart).

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It isn't uncommon for medical personnel to give terminally ill patients large enough doses of morphine that the morphine probably hastens death. In most cases, hastening death is not the purpose, but a side effect. The key here is the words "die in agony." There are two parts: "die" and "in agony." Giving them enough morphine so that they weren't in agony might well mean that the patients would die.

I'd be astonished if some of this didn't happen in those medical facilities that actually had enough morphine. The only thing that shocks me is that anyone would talk about it (if in fact someone did).

Both my parents died while comatose as much from morphine as from their conditions. I say morphine is a blessing.

[(Anonymous)]

I read or heard someplace (and now i don't remember where except that it was somewhere that sounded to me like a reliable single-witness account) that medical staff at one hospital was DEBATING the question of whether dying patients that could not be evacuated should be euthanized if and when the staff had to be evacuated and patients left behind. I do not know the outcome of that discussion for some reason. Possibly it was reported by somebody who was still on the scene in a hospital. The report I heard may have been the origin of the Mail story, just twisted a little to make it more sensational.

If there were hospitals where staff was evacuated but patients left behind, this question had to have come up. But did that actually happen at any hospital? There were clearly patients that died due to deterioriating conditions while waiting to be evacuated, but as far as I know, at least some staff stayed behind in all the hospitals until the patients were evacuated.

The line about staff "fleeing the hospital for fear of armed looters" is almost certainly false. The hospitals were not full of looters. They were locked down from the outside, and in some cases surrounded by water. Patients had to be evacuated from one large hospital through a hole chopped in the roof of an attached parking ramp because the street was underwater. Hospitals were evacuated because they had no power, working plumbing or air-conditioning, not because of looters.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I still don't remember where I encountered that story about the euthanasia discussion in a hospital, but I didn't intend to post it anonymously. I thought i was logged in.

Having read the comments above that describe the Daily Mail as a right-wing paper, I went back and read the story again. The tone sounds as if they are trying to send a politicized message of some sort, but what??

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I'm with em_h and heavenscalyx. Morphine is frequently used that way, and given the inability to properly test... More deaths might happen.

But I'm actually here to give y'all a link to more Jabbor Gibson news. He can't find his family, and he's going to Los Angeles.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It was probably only poor people in the hospital, so they might not care as much.

B

[elessidil.livejournal.com]

I saw in in blurb from yahoo and cnn that a nursing home was in question because there were a high number of deaths. according to the article they are being charged. At the bottom they mention a hospital and 45 bodies found but they do really say how they died.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/13/katrina.impact/index.html?section=cnn_topstories

sorry not sure how to create link.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I saw a different account of the same story in another British paper. The story concerned one nurse having to euthanise an overweight man they couldn't evacuate. I was shocked, but not sure to give it credence at the time. So the jury is still out.

[sageofgodalming.livejournal.com]

I don't believe this has huge implications even if true.

In the Schiavo case, the family believed there was a chance she would recover, and the medics and courts disagreed, all the way to the top. So the entire apparatus of the state was ranged against a chance for life of a person, on their narrative. The case was a precedent for other, similar cases. There were years taken over this decision and it was just about as deliberate as a decision could be in the USA, short of passing a constitutional amendment.

In this case, doctors had to take decisions in very short time with little and diminishing information, and were plainly unsure about the rightness of what they were doing. They had no choice. This case sets no precedent and at the most provides illustrative examples for those who have to provide guidance for medical staff to use in an emergency.

Conservatives may disagree with what the doctors did; they may even try to legislate what doctors should do in emergencies in future. But I think the likelihood is that they will recognise the uniqueness of the situation and let it go. There is nothing to fight over, no routine medical decisions to be influenced here.