The veterinary ethic.

Butch was a one-year-old Rottweiler-boxer mix--he looked like a pit bull on steroids. I came home one day to find him very sick, apparently poisoned. Taking him to a veterinarian, I got the bad news: "He's real sick and he's not going to make it." I asked the doc if there wasn't something that could be done but he assured me it was hopeless. "He's dying and he's suffering a lot. We should put him down." I have to admit that the additional $90 fee for "putting Butch to sleep" probably played into my decision, but mostly I held on to a slim hope that he might make it, so I told the vet I was bringing Butch home. He strongly disagreed. As you've probably guessed, we nursed him for a couple of weeks and eventually he got back to his big healthy sell It was my first experience with the veterinary ethic--relieving suffering through "euthanasia," or as it roughly translates, "good death."

While it may make sense with animals, the specter of physicians accepting the veterinary ethic of dispensing death to end suffering ought to scare the "beck" out of us. Apparently that's what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when a physician and two nurses decided to play God and end the lives of a number of their patients with a deadly cocktail of morphine and Versed, a sedative. On July 18, Anna Pou, M.D., and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were arrested on the charge of being "a principal to second degree murder." The three are charged in the deaths of four persons, aged 61, 67, 90, and 97, who were patients at the New Orleans Memorial Medical Center. Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti suggested that there might be more victims to be identified. As for the four victims Foti said, "This is not euthanasia. This is homicide. These patients would have lived through an evacuation if they had not been killed."

Three days after Katrina, the Memorial Medical Center was flooded on the first floor and was without electricity. The temperatures hit 100 degrees and the situation was unquestionably a difficult one. Most patients and staff were evacuated by boat or helicopter; however, transporting some patients proved quite difficult, especially those who were very ill.

According to the affidavit filed by Foti, witnesses testified that Susan Mulderick, the "Incident Commander" at Memorial, told them, "We're not leaving any living patients behind." Other witnesses testified that the two nurses and Dr. Pou told them a decision had been made to "administer lethal doses." Dr. Pou, who was apparently unfamiliar with the patients, assumed they were all unconscious. When a staffer informed her that the 61-year-old man, although paralyzed, was "conscious, awake and alert" Dr. Pou ordered that he be sedated. When the staffer refused, Dr. Pou allegedly said she was going to tell the patient she was giving him something to help with dizziness. Witnesses testified that Dr. Pou entered the room with a syringe and closed the door. Post-mortem tissue samples taken from the patient showed lethal doses of morphine and Versed. Neither drug had been prescribed for him previously.

Apparently not wanting witnesses to their "acts of mercy," those involved ordered everyone removed from the medical center. Angela McManus had been staying with her mother who was recovering from a blood infection. When she refused to leave, she was forced out by armed police officers who reportedly had their guns drawn. According to Ms. McManus, her mother was doing well when she left, but mysteriously died later that day, although she is not among the four victims named in the affidavit. McManus said, "I need some answers. Euthanasia is something you do to a horse or an animal. When you do it to people it's called murder."

Unfortunately, many in the medical community don't agree with Ms. McManus. Dr. Daniel Nuss, Dr. Pou's boss at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, said, "This is vilifying the heroes. I think it's presumptuous for the attorney general or anyone else to try to assign blame for what happened under such desperate circumstances" A perusal of medical discussion boards on the Internet reveals a split in the opinions from physicians regarding this case, but the majority seems to be supporting Dr. Pou.

Dr. Pou said: "There were patients there that had orders of do not resuscitate, in other words if they died, to allow them to die naturally and not use any heroic methods to resuscitate them. We did everything within our power to give the best treatment that we could to the patients in the hospital, to make them comfortable." Pou is a very educated physician and surgeon. If she is unable to distinguish between "allowing them to die naturally" and giving them a shot that kills them, we're all in trouble.

Perhaps you should ask your physician where he or she stands on this issue. Does your doctor stand by the dictum credited to Hippocrates, "First, do no harm"? Does your doctor take a stand against physicians becoming dispensers of death? If not, maybe it's time to find a new doctor.

by John Burns, D.C.

John Burns is a doctor of chiropractic in Citrus Heights, California.