With the God of the Bible having largely disappeared from public consciousness in Great Britain, the closest thing to a replacement deity is the British National Health Service. Created after World War II, the NHS was the object of intense affection for decades and, as recently as this year, 72% of Britons polled said that the NHS was “crucial” to their society. This obsessive and often mawkish devotion to a false god has made a wholesale reform of the NHS — or, better, its replacement — virtually impossible. And the NHS is desperately in need of reform or replacement.
How desperately? A July 13 article in the New England Journal of Medicine told the sorry tale:
For much of December 2022 and January 2023, media reports featured ambulances lined up outside hospitals, unable to hand over their patients; patients lying at home with fractured hips, unattended by ambulances; emergency department waiting times exceeding 12 hours; and hospital corridors crowded with patients unable to be admitted. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated in December that 300 to 500 people were dying each week because of these delays. Ambulance workers and nurses held their first strikes in 40 years over pay and conditions. In mid-March, mid-April, and mid-June, junior doctors held 3-4 day strikes — and senior doctors have scheduled similar action. Hundreds of thousands of operations and appointments have been canceled.
In the background of this acute crisis, waiting lists for specialist consultation have been growing and now exceed 7 million patients (in a country of 66 million people)….
And as if that gross dysfunction were not enough, being the object of misplaced worship by the British public seems to have convinced NHS doctors that they are, in fact, God.
Indi Gregory was born on February 24 but soon experienced difficulties breathing; she then began to suffer prolonged seizures. The baby was born with a hole in her heart and required surgeries to drain fluid from her bowel and her skull. Two months later, a genetic test determined that the child suffered from a rare and degenerative mitochondrial disease and she was given a breathing tube. Her parents stated that their daughter responded to them even under these severe conditions, and “on her good days, she is babbling, making noises, moving all her limbs.”
Nonetheless, when Indi was six months old, her doctors decided that they should withhold further “invasive” treatment. When Indi’s parents disagreed, the hospital went to the courts, where the doctors later changed their request and asked to be permitted to remove critical care, saying that it would be kinder to let her die. The parents continued their legal battle; Rome’s Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital offered to accept Indi as a patient, while the Italian government gave her Italian citizenship and said it would cover all costs; but the judge decided that a move to Rome was not in the baby’s best interest. The parents then asked that Indi be allowed to die at home, but, presumably on doctors’ advice, the judge wouldn’t hear of that either. So, on November 13, Indi died in a hospice in her mother’s arms, after life-support was withdrawn.
Indi had been baptized on September 22 and, through this tragic story, Christian faith entered her family. For that, we may be grateful. But not for the overbearing doctors nor for the courts who took the physicians’ side rather than the parents’.
There are doubtless circumstances when overwrought and distraught parents cannot face the reality of a terminal medical situation, but this does not seem to have been one of them. Great Britain has not (yet) embraced euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. But its National Health Service personnel seem to believe that some of their patients have a duty to die, and if their relatives won’t cooperate, then the docs and the law will take control of the situation and see that the duty to die is fulfilled. Thus does the godlike status of the NHS express itself through its medical personnel.
I am the odd man out in a family of doctors: my maternal grandfather was a doctor, my mother was a medical technologist, my brother is a doctor, my daughter is a doctor, my late son-in-law was a doctor, and I have a doctor son-in-law today. So please don’t question my esteem for the medical profession. But when doctors imagine themselves deities who de facto know “what’s best” in these difficult neo-natal cases, the ethics of the ancient Hippocratic Oath seem to crumble, as the godlike medicos assert an authority that properly belongs to parents — and do so in the name of a pseudo-divine compassion.
(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)
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Having worked in the NHS after training in the RAF Nursing Service I can assure you that even back in 1981 UK doctors were euthanising patients on the quiet.I know because a doctor and I had a fall out over it.I was reported to the Regional Nursing Officer who was a Christian and agreed with my arguments BUT said we should do as the doctor orders us to do! I didn`t and left the hospital soon after!
There’s been de facto euthanasia practiced in the States also. Some hospice facilities work that way. But it’s quite a different thing than what we see going on openly & enthusiastically in Canada today.
I Thank God for you !
Last year, I retired from working as a medical technologist MT(ASCP) in the hospital microbiology lab after 41 years of service. During the last ten years of my working, the lab was constantly short-staffed, as were many other departments in our 500-bed hospital. There were two other large hospitals in our city, and they were also short-staffed in almost every area of the hospital. So…it seems to me that unless we have a “revival” of interest in working in the various medical professions–and I do mean WORKING!–we in the U.S. will be in a precarious situation where our lives may dependent on whether the hospitals and care facilities have enough staff to provide our care. Unskilled nursing care can and often is provided by loved ones in a home setting, but services like lab, X-ray, respiratory therapy, physical therapy, etc., and also all the aspects of skilled nursing care, require trained professionals. I hope that many more Christians will examine these careers and either enter them themselves or encourage their children/teens to look into the many health care careers. Otherwise, we may end up the same way as Great Britain.
Associated with ethics issues during pastoral care as chaplain supervisor, physicians, who do possess the knowledge to make the best decisions, often remove that right from the patient’s proxy [when patient is incapable of rational response] convinced their decision is best. Nevertheless, the right to make that decision must never be taken from patient or proxy. When it’s a question of one’s life or death, regardless of the presumed futility, prolonged suffering, including consumption of resources, the decision belongs by moral right to the patient or their proxy. There may, however, occur an issue of depletion of a necessary resource as is apt to occur in military field hospitals, impoverished settings. Then the decision may have to return to the medical team.
What’s of course missing in medical ethics due to the secularization of culture is the decreased value of human life created in God’s image. We find an increase in this secularist tendency to make perceived practical, utilitarian decisions both in the medical field and in the judiciary, now more inclined to support ‘docs who play deity’. Not dissimilar to the medical thinking of the German 1920 classic, The Right to End Life Unworthy of Life, authors Alfred Hoche psychiatry Karl Binding legal scholar, later adopted by Nazi philosopher member of Hitler’s cabinet Alfred Rosenberg. We’re moving closer to what occurred then. The right to one’s life, whether conscious or absent of awareness, must remain with the person.
Perhaps it would be best to leave the medical situation in G.B. To the Brits and concentrate on ours. We have plenty of problems and need change so that it is more effective , efficient and equitable.
I firmly believe the NHS should have allowed the parents to either take their child home and transfer care to the hospital in Italy. They were wrong to not allow these things.
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Having said that, it seems this infant had a terminal condition. Simply withdrawing life support does not sound like euthanasia to me. My understanding is that taking positive steps (the administration of a drug specifically to cause death) is properly called euthanasia (or murder.)
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We have hospice for the elderly, terminal cancer patients and the like. We do not have many options for parents and their dying infants.
Britain forbade the parents leaving the country and accepting the Vatican offer of care for their child. Apparently UK thinks it owns you because of its social health care system.
It’s a combination of the way the NHS, appointed guardians, & the courts work together. The courts invariably listen more to appointed guardians than to the parents. And in these cases, parents can be lower income folk without the means or connections to retain the best legal representation.
This might have been titled “When Docs, Lawyers, & Bureaucrats Spawn a Pantheon”
I personally sat in the emerg for 12 hours in a cdn hospital. The health care system under the liberals is appalling and dehumanizing