The other more well known Oath is the Hippocratic Oath wherein Physicians pledge to prescribe only beneficial treatments, according to his or her abilities and judgment and to refrain from causing harm or hurt to their patient.
The Hypocritic Oath, in contrast, turns the above up-side-down and extends its blessing to eliminating the patient entirely from the face of this earth.
Sadly, the Medical Community has more or less acquiesced to what politicians in their conscious effort to reduce health care costs on the basis that dead people use up less resources than sick ones.
Your Mother was once the Chair of West Ottawa Hospice while I was a Board Member. The Principle of Hospice is to provide a special kind of care that focuses on the quality of life for people and their caregivers who are experiencing an advanced, life-limiting illness. Hospice Care provides compassionate care for people in the last phases of incurable disease so the they may live as fully and as a comfortable as possible including free of pain.
At that time, our Hospice was Home Delivered Care by a vast team of specially trained volunteers ...and since then it now includes actual Hospice Premises with beds.
The idea behind Hospice was to celebrate life and to act as a counter to MAID - Medical Assistance In Dying, with the latter now taking on a life of its own ...pardon the pun. Since the inception of MAID in Canada in 2016 some 14,000 have chosen death by medical suicide and those numbers are growing with each passing year. And they no longer have to be near death to qualify for this life ending procedure - most are elderly but the young and the disabled are also included.
To add insult, Hospices are now losing their funding if they refuse to include MAID in their tool box of help.
In her recent and most insightful letter to an Editor, Doctor E. Warner had this to say about MAID:
The decision of our political leaders to solve our health care crisis by convincing the Canadian Public that murdering our most expensive citizens - the olde, the disabled and the chronically ill - is the sign of an enlightened, compassionate society is beyond egregious. It not only signals the impending collapse of our health-care system but heralds the moral collapse of our society as a whole.
I end with Dylan Thomas' immortal words:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
We Will All Be Better Off For It.
As I See It...
K.D. Bell
