I have come across many medical articles in the past couple weeks and feel a need to write more about this stuff here. Some of the material I read is very spot on…and some of it pisses me right off. Like this.

CHARLESTON – Doctors could refuse to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on patients who are so ill that it would do no good – even if the patients had previously said in writing they wanted it – under a bill pending in the Legislature.

The bill is a more narrow version of a measure that died in the House last year amid national furor over Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman in Florida who died after her husband won a court order to remove a feeding tube.

While last year’s bill covered CPR, dialysis and mechanical ventilation, this year’s measure deals solely with withholding CPR.

OK..let’s get this straight. A patient has made their wishes known…say you’re 65 years old and have every desire to live out your life…you go into a hospital for a minor heria repair type surgery. You go into cardiac arrest. You’ve signed all the advanced directives papers that state you want measures taken to keep you alive. This would include the very basics such as CPR…BUT the doctor (who rarely performs this act BTW, it’s almost always the nurses) decides, NO, you’re older and why put you through this? Hmm. It isn’t right.

Of all nursing home patients with advanced directives that are not appropriate for their current condition, CPR is the treatment that comes up the most, said Dr. Alvin Moss, director of West Virginia University’s Center for Health Ethics and Law.

Under the bill, if a patient has a living will or medical power of attorney requesting CPR be used to extend life, doctors could refuse to perform it if the attending physician and another doctor agree it would be “medically ineffective.”

Medically ineffective CPR is defined in the bill (HB4022, SB161) as CPR that would be unsuccessful in restoring pulmonary function or that would restore it for only minutes or hours, even if repeated.

Under those circumstances, doctors who refuse to perform CPR could not be subject to criminal or civil liability.

This sounds like the Culture of Death again, making’s it dark agenda known through various legislative acts. A new term in this debate: “medically ineffective”…let’s talk about CPR in general. The stats show that 80% of those who have cardiac failure and who recieve CPR die within a year anyway. How’s that for effectiveness. A 30 year old who has an MI shouldn’t recieve CPR then either…It’s bullshit.

Doctors would have to inform the patient and the patient’s authorized decision-maker about the plan to withhold CPR and give them an opportunity to change doctors. If the patient cannot be transferred to another doctor’s care, the doctor and health care facility would still not be required to provide medically ineffective CPR, the bill says.

I want to know how this effects nurses, who do perform this act all the time. We’re the one’s who find patients in the very conditions that would require CPR in the first place. It’s confusing enough now…we have to know the status of each patient, the wishes and desires. Some patients break down the life saving chain into bits and pieces and we have to know at what point do we stop, continue…add to this an MD order for NO CODE??

Disability advocates oppose the bill.

“It is taking the rights away from people with disabilities to do advanced directives,” said David Stewart of the Fair Shake Network. “Where does it go from there? What’s the point of having these things?”

Stewart said disabled adults fear their lives are not valued as much as the lives of non-disabled people by health care providers who might believe that they have “suffered enough.”

I see this coming as well. Since “suffering” has been used WAY too often as an excuse to end life supports and all that certain groups in society will use this population for the agenda…

Ten states have laws that allow doctors to refuse to provide medically ineffective treatment, said Charles Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging in Washington, D.C. None of those specifically cover only CPR.

He questioned whether the West Virginia bill’s wording would be difficult to enforce.

Research shows that nursing home residents who go into cardiac arrest have almost no chance of being resuscitated and eventually discharged, Sabatino said. But they could linger for days, not the minutes and hours discussed in the West Virginia bill.

Moss said the bill is an attempt to address a problem that he receives call about at least once a month.

Social workers at nursing homes call to say a patient’s family and doctors agree that CPR would be useless. But he tells them that if a patient had written that they wanted CPR, no matter how old that document might be, doctors have to perform it.

Moss said CPR works only about 15 percent of the time. Considering the bill targets people near death, CPR could be expected to work less than 1 percent of the time, he said.

Lots of things we do are medically ineffective…but we still do them. CPR is the first act in a long list of life saving procedures. I doesn’t make any sense to do this on someone who is near death, that I agree with. BUT the medical people should approach the patient long before it gets to this point…

Doctors take an oath to “do no harm” and using CPR on patients near death cracks ribs, bruises lungs and causes brain damage, Moss said.

“You would be forcing doctors to cause excruciating pain on their patients as they are dying. Do we really want to do that?”

Ahh the bleeding hearts telling the half truths again here. Yes, CPR causes broken ribs, bruised lungs and all that. It doesn’t matter how old you are either…it’s a fact with these acts. To say that we take an oath to do no harm is exploiting this issue. Doing harm? Everytime blood is drawn could be considered harm. Everytime an IV is started could be considered harm. Where does it start and end?