Imagine replacing a philosophy that holds that all human life has value, every human being has purpose, the answer to suffering is compassion, medical research should be for all and should never cross a line, and that worshipping death as opposed to accepting life's finite nature will only lead to extinction and replacing those values with their opposites?
That's Canada:
In nearly 30 years as a palliative care physician, Dr. Nathalie Allard has provided end-of-life care in busy hospital hallways, and consulted with families with only a curtain separating them from sick people screaming or vomiting on the other side.
On Thursday, she attended the opening of a brand-new palliative care facility northeast of Montreal that represents the kind of place where she wants to work and, one day, to die.
"It's my workplace -- and my final resting place, probably," she said cheerfully while giving a tour. "Me, I'm going to die."
Located in St-Charles-Borromée in the Lanaudière region, the $8 million facility has 10 rooms for palliative care patients near the end of their lives, as well as outpatient services to help people with terminal diagnoses live more comfortably. It also has a dedicated unit for medical assistance in dying, with room that families of up to 20 can book for a loved one’s last moments.
Health care providers say the space meets a growing need for end-of-life services including MAID, which is involved in more than one out of ten deaths in Lanaudière.
Held under a white tent with speeches, cocktails and artfully scattered flowers on the ground, the launch event felt more like party than a building opening.
While Allard focuses on palliative and doesn't perform MAID herself, she says the end of a life, including doctor-assisted death, can be a celebration too.
"We celebrate weddings, we prepare for a wedding," she said. "I won't disappoint you, but we're all going to die. So why not prepare for this great moment and celebrate this great moment which is our death?"
I'll just leave this right here:
Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry—as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly antisocial way.
Yes, God forbid that we should not celebrate death but accept it. That we should look at the measure of one's life and its impact on others as opposed to removing someone from the gene pool.
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McMaster University in Ontario is known as the birthplace ofevidence-based medicine—the practice of integrating clinical expertise with the best available research findings and considerations of patient values and preferences. That legacy makes recent remarks on so-called gender medicine by several McMaster researchers especially baffling.
Earlier this month, five McMaster researchers from the university’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI) released a statement condemning the “misuse” of systematic reviews that they had authored to justify restrictions on sex-rejection procedures for minors. The controversy is fueled by a growing schism between the university and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), which funded the reviews. After the Southern Poverty Law Center attempted to smear SEGM by formally labeling it a pseudoscientific “hate group,” McMaster’s leadership became uncomfortable with the SEGM affiliation and urged the HEI researchers to distance themselves. Crucially, though, SEGM was forthcoming with McMaster at all stages of their collaboration and agreed to the university’s research agreement and terms for managing conflicts of interest. The reviews, like other systematic reviews in this area of study, found only “low certainty” evidence for the benefits of gender “affirming care.” …
In light of these points, the McMaster researchers’ claim that it is “unconscionable” to restrict access to “affirming care” represents shortsighted ethical analysis and a retreat from other values that ought to guide clinical ethics. Patient autonomy is indeed a core value in medical ethics, but it should not be valued at the expense of “beneficence” and “non-maleficence.” Notably, in an interview with journalist Jesse Singal, Guyatt argues that some physicians may determine that an adolescent possesses the maturity to make serious medical decisions. He goes on to concede, however, that “they may be wrong. Maybe no 14-year-old is ever in that position. I’m not the person who can say.”
Basing support for pediatric gender medicine on a combination of low-certainty evidence and a minor’s protean desires is not an act of compassion. True compassion requires weighing risks and benefits in a way that may limit children’s immediate desires but will preserve their capacity to make irreversible medical decisions—after they come of age.
Patient autonomy is fine when the patient does what some people expect him to.
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