"Some docs do know harm" Please give this columnist some accolades.

[bobbolink]

Susan Greene regularly puts it right out there with excellent information and opinion. This is a good example. It deserves some supportive emails to her.

Some docs do know harm
By Susan Greene
Denver Post Columnist
Posted: 04/23/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT

They promise to "First, do no harm." So why, some physicians are asking, do some in their ranks facilitate torture?

Doctors met at CU's med school this week to contemplate the lines between outright atrocities, harsh interrogation techniques and everyday mistreatment of patients. "We have an obligation to show why these things happen," said Michael Grodin, an ethicist from Boston University who treats torture victims.

Grodin spoke at the school's annual "Holocaust in Contemporary Bio-ethics" seminar about the prominence of doctors in the Nazi party and their role in sterilizing and experimenting on thousands of people, and helping to gas millions of others.

"There are big transgressions and little ones. If we weren't doing the small things, it would never be acceptable to do the big things," said Erin Egan, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. "Arguing it's insulting to say we're like Nazis derails a conversation we need to have."

As Greene reports, many doctors are coming together to demand accountability for those who have sold their souls. I hope we will applaud those doctors, and also the rare columnist who brings this to light. You know they will receive a lot of hate for this!

Please read the rest of this important column!

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or [e-mail].

[HeresyLives]

1. Link

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12202860

[bobbolink]

3. Thanks! Meant to include that. It's hard to include everything on a 15-minute library computer.

This is another way to get to the same conclusion.... supporting the docs who are fighting this!

"But from those who are burned out, we're taught to take what we can get. From those unwilling to look us in the eye or listen, we turn the other cheek. And with those who are hardened to us, we just lie there, keep quiet and pay up.

It's a fact of U.S. medicine that hospitals shortchange the poor and elderly. It's common for pain to go discounted. It's a reality that emergency-room patients get released with no follow-up. And every day, many undergoing chemotherapy can't afford anti-nausea pills because they cost $20 a pop.

Anyone who has done any time in a hospital knows how fragile dignity can be. "

This is a very important column.

I hope it will receive the attention it deserves.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12202860

[nxylas]

2. K&R

Oddly enough, as I was reading this, a song called 'Healthy Body, Sick Mind' started playing on my Pandora internet radio station. How very appropriate.

[bobbolink]

4. Certainly appropriate. This is one sick fucker of a nation.

Yet, few will comment on this.... even though it's a very hopeful avenue to create the very change we so badly need.

:cry:

[JeffR]

5. K & R. That's a great article.

It's encouraging to know that more doctors are speaking out about these issues. We have to hope that doctors who don't listen to their patients will at least be more inclined to listen to other doctors.

[bobbolink]

7. Torture and bad treatment of poor people, all tied together.

Genius!

[JeffR]

8. Yep. And it's all part of the same spectrum of banal evil.

And it's time the medical profession purged its ranks.

[bobbolink]

9. What's sadder is that DU "progressives" have so little interest....

:cry:

[JeffR]

11. Seems not.

:-(

[smokey nj]

6. Thanks for this, bobbie!

[JeffR]

10. Kick

:kick: