One week down—two to go. I am so ready for a BREAK. Think of the proverbial man crawling in the desert, kept going by only that distant mirage of water. Picture that, and that’s how I’m feeling. I have only this one class yet to get through and then I’m out of school for TWO MONTHS! Unfortunately, I’m afraid my promise of a break will also turn out to be a mirage. I have to take the GRE in July sometime, so although I’ll be out of school at the end of May, my life will not be study-free.
My class this time is a philosophy class. As you may have guessed, I don’t do so well with philosophy. This particular class is called “Biomedical Ethics.” I chose to take this class as a substitute for one of my required classes. The required class was called something like Human Values and something-something… so it was essentially the same thing. I didn’t want to take that one, however, primarily because the professor requires you to debate controversial issues, and I VERY much dislike things like that. Additionally, that particular professor has a knack of “inciting riots,” and students reportedly come out of there as mad as hornets. The professor in my first English class used to bring up controversial issues and then make us defend our positions. He would try to out-logic us, and I just don’t want a repeat experience.
Since this summer class can be taken as a substitute for the afore-mentioned one, I signed myself up right away and was glad to do so. According to Dr. S’s previous syllabi, he did not require debates, the main thing I was trying to avoid. So imagine my consternation when he tells us on Tuesday that he is thinking about having us break up into small groups and do debates—something he’s never done before! One of us has to present the positive side, he said, and one of us has to present the negative side, and one of us has to play the devil’s advocate. “So what do you think about that?” he asked us. I looked around the room desperately. There are only eleven of us signed up for the class. And all ten of the others sat there like bumps on a log—nonchalant, not caring.
Well, now is not the time to be bashful, I told myself. “I object!” I cried (although admittedly not in those exact words). I got my point across and gave my reasons why I so dislike group projects, and amazingly enough, he agreed that group projects probably aren’t the best. And so he would “think about it,” he said. I told him I would much rather do a research paper than to have to do the proposed project. Although he hasn’t given us our term project yet, he did confirm yesterday that he was not going to go with the group project idea. Thank God!!!
As to the content of the class… I really didn’t know that there were quite so many controversial issues in healthcare. We have spent this entire week talking about physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia. According to Dr. S, what typically happens is that our theories adjust to our experiences. Do you agree? For example, a person who has always opposed PAS and euthanasia will perhaps change his/her position if he/she becomes a terminally ill patient in excruciating pain or sees a loved one in that position.
I much prefer to ignore the issue altogether, but I suppose having to consider both sides is good for me, and so I suppose it is good for you all too. One of the books we have to read gives an example of a man who stands to inherit a lot of money if his six year old cousin weren’t around to inherit it first. In one scenario, the man decides to kill his cousin by drowning him in the bathtub. In another scenario, the man’s cousin conveniently hits his head on his own, falls into the bathtub, and drowns as the man just stands back and watches. The end result is the same in both cases. Would you say the man’s actions (or lack thereof) in the second scenario make him just as guilty of the cousin’s death as he is in the first scenario? The authors of the book maintain that both are equally wrong. The only difference is that one is active killing and the other is passive killing.
So put it into a healthcare example; is our socially-acceptable passive method of “letting die” (i.e., taking off respirators) just as wrong as active physician-assisted suicide?
With the exception of Oregon, in the United States, our method of handling terminally ill patients is “letting die.” In the Netherlands, highly-regulated physician-assisted suicide is perfectly legal and they have serious concerns with the US’s method of handling these kinds of patients. In Germany, although euthanasia is illegal, PAS is legal but “unprofessional.” In other words, if a doctor assists a patient in a suicide, their medical associations will yank his license and keep him from practicing medicine, although there is no legal recourse. This is because of Germany’s tragic history with doctors’ experiments in World War II. If a non-medical person helps a terminally ill patient commit suicide, however, he is in violation of Germany’s Good Samaritan laws, which say that under certain conditions it is mandatory to give a person help—not harm. So what happens is that the assisting person must not be anywhere around when the patient dies, or he/she will risk legal prosecution. And so the patient dies alone.
Believe me, this only scratches the surface of all that could be said about this topic, but I believe I shall leave it at that for now.
It’s been a long week.
Labels: School
