What Should Doctors Do For Patients In Disasters When They Cannot Be Saved?
Arthur Caplan
2011-03-19 00:00:00
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For the most part, help can't get to the ailing and injured. Doctors without Borders says it may pull out of the area near the nuclear plant. In Japan, where nearly one in four residents is over 65, the disaster will likely take the largest toll on the elderly.

"We're trying to comfort and help them, but we can't do too much," Keiko Endo, a nurse at the Kesennuma shelter told the Associated Press.

The crisis calls to mind America's devastating natural disaster of 2005 - Hurricane Katrina. In the aftermath, workers in New Orleans hospitals were left frantically trying to care for ailing patients without electricity, water, supplies - or anyone to rescue them. The ethical questions raised during that national disaster about what should be done for those left helpless and dying are so difficult that Americans never directly answered them.

In New Orleans, Tenet's Memorial Medical Center was marooned by the floodwaters. As temperatures climbed to 95 degrees and above, the hospital became a fetid, smelly hell. Most doctors and nurses left. Some patients were too sick, too fragile, or too obese to be moved. Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses heroically stayed on with their patients.

Without power, they knew those kept alive by technology would face terrible deaths. Nine of them did die. Each of those had massive doses of narcotic drugs such as morphine or Versed present in their bodies. There is no doubt in my mind, as I wrote in a report to the Attorney General's Office for the State of Louisiana, that they died as a result of active euthanasia -mercy killing. Was that the right thing to do? I do not think it was.

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