Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics;
If western countries closed all their hospitals, he said, life expectancy there would drop by only eight months.
Look at the bright side – there’ll be precious little need for medical ethicists.
I have a couple of suggestions.
Lets stop all foreign aid. The resulting drop in human population will make a big dent in co2 emmisions.
We should slap huge tariffs on Chinese products. Slowing down their economy would result in fewer coal-fired generating stations being built.
Instead of sending healthcare professionals to developing countries, lets send all immigrants from developing countries back home, where they’ll have a smaller carbon footprint. They can use their newfound knowledge to help improve things back home.
I could go on, but I’ve probably angered enough people for now.
I am so much looking forward to my back alley hip replacement.
Does that eight months figure factor in the mass starvation by health care system bureaucrats (or would they simply live off their fat stores)?
And as an added bonus, the early diers will be predominately male.
Your link, while not to the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, is interesting —
HarperOne has published a Green Bible that highlights with green ink over 1,000 references to the earth and what the publishers say is a scriptural mandate to care for it. “The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth,”
“You shall not strip your vineyard bare.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/10/13/green-bible-stresses-eco-passages-may-make-some-see-red/
I wonder how many houses the good doctor owns and what’s their square footage. And maybe how many children he has.
We could just stop all medical assistance to Africa. Major population reduction there. Maybe help them along with some nice war plagues, maybe a bit of chemical warfare. Depopulate the whole frickin’ continent and make it a park.
Hey, anything to save the planet, eh?
Life expectancy without modern medicine is about 40 yrs. That’s how it was in Canada a century ago, and in many African countries today. This “doctor” is not advocating that. Instead, he urges abandoning hospitals for home care, similar to the country doctors of olde tyme. Given modern knowledge and drugs, he could be right.
That is, if you make a few minor changes. Like, for example, banning medical lawsuits and abandoning all hope of surviving appendicitis or cancer.
Extremely minor changes, really.
Lets give it a try on a small, dispensible population. Like medical ethicists for example.
This has Maurice Strong written all over it!
So basically the ethics of EACME are that it is their right to deny the service they are trained at the public expense to perform and sworn to deliver in their own rituals and rights of passage.
Also interesting that this appears in “Faithworld” !
Much like the Lancet which publishes many screeds proclaiming the fact of AGW and promoting the adoption of draconian interventions of the state there is bound to be a left wing source of funds behind the Preacher and his acolytes.
In the case of the Lancet it is George Soros the Democracy hating leftwing financier.
These are meddlesome and dangerous people who promote their totalitarian views without any serious opposition.
Just like Maurice Strong.
What if we had a system within which the more credits you purchased, the longer you were allowed to live? We could call these Life Credits, (Carbon Credits 2.0). Exemptions for India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, and Africa, of course.
Here’s the rest of the story: http://www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_binary/o4508_life%20expectancy.pdf
Read the summary on page 25. Is this a story about keeping a cap on pension liability? If life expectancy continues to be pushed further towards 100 the issue becomes driven by the increases in costs for geriatic care and crushing pension liabilities (especially for certain European nations).
Forced retirement is taking on a whole new “soylent” green hue.
The Prince of Darkness has donned a green costume.
Doug @2:51 …..you nailed it.
A funny thing happened to me on my way to my medical career. I lost my way and became very stupid!
“Life expectancy without modern medicine is about 40 yrs”
Actually, that was life expectancy before modern sanitation (waste removal and water purification) and food production methods were developed. I like my odds of making it to 60 without ever getting an MRI. I don’t like them if the sewage system were taken away.
And wait times wouldn’t get any worse….
does anyone remember the movie Logan’s Run?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
Two Words
Soylent Green.
Syncro
it’s a scary world we live in when the themes of 1970’s post apocalyptic sci-fi movies have become so relevant :S
“Medical ethics” is seen by most doctors as a means for hospital bureaucrats to justify their cost-cutting measures by having their decisions judged as “ethical”. As far as I’m concerned, medical ethicists are one of the best arguments I’ve seen for post-natal abortion.
I’ve stopped arguming with medical ethicists as their weltanschauung posits that “society” is the greater good and individual rights must be sacrificed whenever the two come in conflict. Doctors have an obligation to individual patients, and, in the case of libertarian physicians such as myself, I maintain that individual rights are paramount. There can be no agreement on this issue and I do my best to ignore medical ethicists.
If the population based health model is combined with AGW extremism, expect neutron bombs to make a big comeback as eco-friendly means of reducing population carbon footprints.
WWTDD? (What Would Tommy Douglas Do?)
Eliminate health care which he single-handedly created? Or save the earth (which only the Goreacle can do)?
Actually, this would be a serious dilemma for not-dead-enough Tommy. These eco-killer-ethicist ideas eventually lead to who is most important in society and who is dispensable; who should be sterilized and who should breed; who should live and who should die. This is just the newest form of “Eugenics” which T Douglas wrote about in his masters thesis, originally made popular by Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) and also endorsed by Nellie McClung (another famous Canadian leftist).
Really, how do socialists and leftists in general reconcile their competing viewpoints of:
* Unionized redneck forestry workers vs eco-terrorists and gay rights?
* working for the poor and disabled vs constantly reinventing eugenics for those same groups?
Their moral superiority and self-evident moral hypocrisy is unparalleled!
I forgot to add that Eugenics was also very popular with a certain Austrian-born leader of Germany back in the 30’s and 40’s who had a funny little moustache and thought that killing Jews was a gas…
I didn’t say the “N” or “H” word, therefore you can’t invoke Godwin’s law!
nice stick handling there BB 😉
I just think its nice to see these Greenies coming out and telling the truth about what they want. They want to half the world’s population by 2020, maybe half it again by 2025. Survivors get to live in ecofriendly mud huts.
In a free country, one should be able to say these kinds of things.
Now, seeing as how with the Greenies making the rules I’m 100% sure to be in the “surplus” half of the population, what with my eeeeevile planet destroying imperialist truck and all, I reserve the right to hold a differing opinion.
Unless somebody comes up with a plague that only kills people who wear Birkenstocks with wool socks in the winter. I’m fully on board with that.
I agree with Loki. I remember when this whole medical ethics as its own specialty was getting started. It was just another bunch of camp followers, many of them medical wannabes, latching themselves onto the health care industry, sucking more money and resources out of an already stretched system in order to get in the way of legitimate research, stick their ivory tower noses where they didn’t belong — all in the name of holier-than-thou, socialist BS wrapped in the flag of “ethics”. Nicholson is one more BSer spewing out unsupported nonsense in the name of protecting his sinecure. What does he have to lose? Unless he can keep grinding out this drivel, the conferences and soapboxes dry up, and he back to slugging it out in the trenches — if he ever actually did.
Medical ethics and human rights tribunals share a common goal. Common law and individual freedom be damned!
DrDave brings up the point of medical ethicists interfering with medical research. A project in which I was an investigator had a delay of 9 months while the ethics review board argued over the exact wording of the agreement that every patient was to read and sign before being a research subject. This was about 5 pages long and I had a number of patients refuse to participate because they couldn’t be bothered to read the thing. All the project inolved was administering a 1 page questionaire with 15 mainly yes/no questions to each particpant.
We got paid per patient enrolled and at the investigators meeting a number of doctors brought up the very logical idea of paying each participant for their time but apparently this was considered unethical. I know that had I offered to pay every patient I approached to take part in the study $25 I would have had 100% participation and a much more valid cross-sectional view of my practice. I certainly had all patients who qualified flagged when they arrived as I paid my receptionist $25 for every patient she found meeting the study criteria that completed the questionaire.
I’ve done human research before and never bothered with any sort of ethics review if the research simply involves people doing something which they would normally do anyway when they’d see me, just in a more rigid and formalized fashion. Funny how what was considered to be ethical 20 years ago is suddenly unethical when the “experts” become involved.
Dereliction of duty, by withholding treatment, invoked to ‘save the planet’.
This is about the same as engineering collectivized famines in the Ukraine by Stalin, or The Great Leap Forward by Chairman Mao.
First the planet doesn’t need saving, it has been here for 4.5 billion years and will likely be around for another billion or so years.
This like the Paul Watson’s of the world advocating the elimination of approx. 5 billion of the world’s population to the acceptable level of 1 billion. And just who are the anointed who decide which 5 billion are slated for ‘planet saving activities’.
Looks like Robert Mugabe has made a start in this direction, by ensuring mass starvation due to a collapsing economy.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4938467.ece
Death is stalking Zimbabwe’s children, as a potentially catastrophic famine gathers momentum. Aid agencies say that half the population, about five million people, face starvation, two-thirds of children are out of school and water shortages have led to deadly cholera outbreaks.
The Times went on a 600-mile (965km)journey through the eastern province of Manicaland and discovered a country whose reserves of food are exhausted and where the diseases of hunger — kwashiorkor, marasmus and pellagra — are appearing to a degree never seen in the country before.
I am anything but reassured.
But, if western countries got rid of all their garbagemen, life expectancy would drop by about 20 years.
Ergo, garbagemen are more important than doctors.
The very rich will get to live as long as they want, provided the donate to the WWF and other green causes. I’m over 70, in very good health but I guess my future is behind me.