By: Wesley J. Smith

A study has found that people with serious cognitive impairments who are conscious--people who are routinely dehydrated to death in most states--feel pain. From the story:

Severely brain-damaged patients in a "minimally conscious state" may still feel pain and require painkilling treatment, according to European researchers.

A minimally conscious state (MCS) is different than a persistent vegetative state (PVS), which involves wakefulness without awareness of self or surroundings. MCS patients do show some evidence of awareness of self and their surroundings. However, caregivers have difficulty assessing MCS patients' levels of conscious pain based on their behavior, according to background information in the study by Dr. Steven Laureys, of the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege, Belgium, and colleagues.

They compared brain activity following electrical stimulation of the median nerve in five MCS patients (ages 18 to 74), 15 PVS patients (ages 18 to 75), and 15 healthy people (ages 19 to 64). The researchers focused on brain areas responsible for pain sensation (the cortical pain matrix), including the thalamus, the primary somatosensory cortex, and the insular, frontoparietal and anterior cingulate cortices. The MCS patients showed the same level of activity in these areas as healthy people and significantly more activity than PVS patients. The MCS patients also showed better "connectivity" between different brain regions responsible for pain than PVS patients.

So will dehydration proponents now conclude that the lives of these patients should be sustained? Of course not! They will say that the ability to feel pain means more than ever that they should be put out of their misery.Or, as often happens,

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Commenting on Baroness Warnock's latest proposal, a spokesman for ALERT said today (Friday 19th September):

"Baroness Warnock will make life worse for people with dementia.  She is encouraging them to see themselves as useless eaters, and to seek death in order to benefit society.

"Should her policy be put into action, there would be a moral hazard for NHS workers.  They would have an incentive to let people with dementia feel miserable and helpless, rather than helping them, because that would encourage suicide requests and so free up beds."

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From: Telegraph

Keir Starmer, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, is to clarify whether people should be prosecuted for aiding a suicide following a landmark ruling by the Law Lords last week. It had been assumed that this guidance would affect only cases in which friends or relatives helped people to die abroad, such as at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich.

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ALERT Comment

The Liverpool Care Pathway must be amended.  If it is not there will be an open scandal.

The Department of Health ought not to be seen as imposing a Final Solution to the problem of old age and infirmity.

NHS offers more help to die with dignity at home

By Steve Doughty, Daily Mail
16th July 2008

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From New Directions, July 2008.

Elspeth Chowdharay-Best on the next stage in the battle for life involving new hospital procedures for ensuring a speedy death

When utilitarian values take over from Judeo-Christian tradition, the weakest go to the wall. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill demonstrates the official contempt for human beings too young to defend themselves.

Another danger to helpless people in hospitals, nursing homes and care homes is the government’s new End of Life Care Programme. It is linked to the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’, which bears some resemblance to the method of euthanasia which is becoming popular in the Netherlands: deep sedation without hydration, so that the patient dies for lack of water. Controversy in the British Medical Journal centres round the Pathway’s usefulness to patients. It is undoubtedly useful to the Department of Health’s budget.

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By Wesley J. Smith

I have heard rumors of stories like this from my contacts in the UK, but have not posted on it because that is what they were: Rumors. But now, the BBC has reported that a care facility might have tried to starve an elderly woman to save money. From the story:

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By Hilary White

July 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A British "end of life" care protocol approved for use by the National Health Service (NHS), has created a systematic, and legal, method of euthanising elderly and disabled patients, even while "mercy killing" remains officially illegal, says a prominent expert in elder care. The "Liverpool Care Pathway" will be used to eliminate patients deemed to be "blocking beds" in the increasingly financially strapped public health system.

For years, Dr. Adrian Treloar, a psycho-geriatrician and senior lecturer at the Greenwich Hospital and Guys', King's and St. Thomas's Hospitals in London, has been sounding the warning that the NHS has an unofficial system in place to authorise the killing of vulnerable disabled patients with an unwritten policy of "involuntary euthanasia" by deep sedation and dehydration.

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Mother launches 'right-to-life' legal battle against hospital to save six-year-old daughter

Story from Telegraph News,  by Richard Savill

1 July, 2008

The mother of a terminally ill six-year-old girl is to launch a "right-to-life" legal battle against a hospital after doctors said they would refuse to give her daughter life-saving treatment.