I was cruising along the New York Times Health Section, and there is a woman by the name of Tara Parker-Pope who writes a health blog called “Well”. I’d love to hear her credentials because usually everything she posts is a slight dig at the doctors who work within our healthcare system. In addition it seems to attract the intellectual riff-raff, people who decide to comment about any and everything they have no idea about. So I found an article about a surgeon who was “shaken” in the operating room because he had to remove a tumor from a Jehovah’s Witness. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in receiving blood transfusions. This was a problem for his confidence, because if he accidentally cut something he could just give a blood transfusion – that was his safety net. So I found it interesting – but for two reasons. First, the overwhelming amount of sympathy people had for the surgeon – some of the comments I saw:The problem, Truth Teller, is that your religious beliefs have an effect on the rest of us. What happens when your sincere religious belief clashes, for example, with this doctor’s sincerely held moral duty to save lives? You’ve given this doctor a choice between following his own moral imperative or following yours – if it comes to where he *has* to make the choice, he’ll live with the consequences of either for the rest of his life.
So while you get to feel great and wonderful about following your faith, have some compassion for the rest of us and think about maybe NOT inflicting consequences on us. Consider that maybe if you are supposed to abstain from blood, maybe you should abstain from things that *might* put you in a position where the only way to keep you alive (which the doctor’s religion and/or moral beliefs require) is to violate your stated religious beliefs.
Have some compassion for the rest of us? A doctor’s moral duty is not to save lives – it is to first do no harm. So many people think it’s a doctors’ job to “save lives” when in fact sometimes saving someone’s life is just about the worst thing you could do for them. Ever think about the 88 year old woman who had four or five painful terminal illnesses? You think saving her life with intrusive, painful therapies is going to improve its’ quality?
Another comment I saw:
Here’s a controversial proposal – we as a society decide when some action (whether pursuing sincerely held beliefs or not) is contrary to the good of some other individual. OK we can’t ban suicide. If a JW wants to commit suicide and not involve anyone else (say by not calling 911 when bleeding profusely) ok. But if they are trying to involve a medical professional in their suicide then that is an unconscionable burden on the Dr.
It is not appropriate to ask doctors who are trained entirely to save life and preserve life and life-quality to actively kill a patient by omission of a clear act that would likely save them – then we have stopped them from being doctors. I don’t know what they’ve become but they’re not doctors.
So you can look at a series of practices – refusing treatment outside the concept of palliative care, circumcision, female genital mutilation, partial birth abortion and polygamy – and we can as a society decide if each of those is within the range we can tolerate as a matter of taste (because that’s all conscience is, a taste for a particular set of values) or whether it is outside the reasonable range of taste and into the bounds of compromising another person’s person or profession…
I would argue that this taste for refusing blood not only affects the Dr profoundly, it also harms social values so profoundly that it can be legitimately banned. Not all acts of conscience are equal, some are beyond the pale otherwise we’d be letting willing doctors do female genital mutilation in the US.
This type of thinking is ridiculous – you may not agree with a person’s choice to follow certain religious tenets – but you should respect them as long as they aren’t physically or financially damaging others. What floors me is how no one is actually worried about the person whose LIFE IS AT STAKE – the physician will be okay – the patient is the person to be concerned about, not the physician. And I can honestly say that a Jehovah’s Witness that is going in for a surgery who does not want to receive blood is frightened – more than the surgeon – and isn’t attempting to commit suicide. If that was the case, we could say that people who bungee cord jump, or hang-glide, or skydive, police officers, firefighters, sewer workers, taxicab drivers, and convenience store workers are all attempting suicide by doing necessary things.
The other striking theme in this article – is that the surgeon actually relies on blood transfusions as a safety net. I don’t know this surgeon, and there needs to be a certain amount of confidence in order to get the job done, but I would say it should probably be less. Caution and wary are almost polar opposites of confidence. I don’t want a “confident” surgeon. I want a cautious and wary surgeon who knows his anatomy and physiology, and is confident in his surgical technique. If he is afraid of what he’s actually doing – perhaps that is a good gut check – his actions could kill someone – so he’d probably better practice his technique a little more.
That’s what I think…any thoughts?
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