Pro-choice AND Pro-life.

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I can be a bit sarcastic. There are some biblical passages where God might seem so, but I suspect that is our nature reading, not what he is doing.

As to the blessing, that was wistful [one does try to write in the hope of being read] but not sarcastic. For the why, see several spots in the Gospels partticularly. Conside it a protocol of Zion - ingroup joke.

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And to your neofascist paternalism and democratic freedom:

It is not neofascism nor undemocratic that every government, every society from cohabiting couple to empire necessarily creates rules which favor certain actions and impose sanctions on certain others. The only points of difference are the list of actions in favor and disfavor, and the severity of the sanctions or munificence of the rewards.

Democratic freedom - seems I recently heard someone say "in a democracy you cannot - the MAJORITY can not - do what you want." A democracy - if such a thing can exist on more than a village level today - tewlls us only how the laws are made, not how many or which.

Add to that please - in this finite world, every freedom extended to A takes away from the freedom of B. It is politically incorrect of me thus to speak truth to poswer, but it is not palaeo- or neofascist to say what is.

If something - any given action at all - is made illegal, is our "freedom of choice" to do it thereby removed? Or is that that consequences are attached to a choice we remain free to make?

A synonym of yours does that to me too, undercutting me by making my point in a fraction of the words!

Well, I am into words. Vive la verbiage!

But yes.

I am not going to repeat all of my posts from the other thread.

I think it is intellectually dishonest to suggest that this issue can be boiled down to a simple dichotomy. Were that the case, we would have settled this issue long ago.

I don't particularly care whether people oppose access to abortion on religious grounds, on moral grounds, or on the grounds that it represents a recapture of power from patriarchy. I think all of these arguments fall away in the face of the inescapable fact that, "it's not my body."

I am a physician. I deplore the needless loss of life. But I am also a humanist, and I recognize that it is not in my power, and neither should it be in my power to allow my personal views to interfere with another person's life. When confronted by a woman make a decision, I will keep my mouth shut--and I will encourage others to do the same.

Which is essentially the stance of some of the Desert Fathers referred to elsewhere. It is not mine, they said, to tell the authorities where the thief - murderer - rebel is.

But a dilemma remains - and I do not say I have an answer, that is what dilemmas are for: if a man calls you in [okay, it is a long time since I last had a house call from a doctor, but I still think in those terms] and says, hey, my mother has been in pain for years, seriously declining, now she cannot talk or respond, does not seem to know who I am [I am here combining symptoms from my mother and my father, but all real stuff], please help me put her out of her misery.

Do you?

Not an argument, straight question.

There are a variety of possible medical responses to the patient presenting a terminal condition:

1) use all means available to preserve her life
2) discontinue all therapies, continue alimentation and hydration, and do not resucitate in the event of distress
3) discontinue alimentation, and DNR
4) provide the patient with the means to hasten her own death (assisted suicide)
5) take active steps to hasten the patient's death

1 and 2 are legal approaches, and approaches that I am comfortable receiving instructions from a competent person who has the authority to give them where the circumstances are appropriate.

3 is a questionable practice and one that I am not comfortable with.

4 is a controversial practice. I would not do it, simply because it is a prohibited act in British Columbia, but I don't see it as an unethical practice, provided that appropriate safeguards are in place.

5 is prohibited, so I would not do it, and even if it were not prohibited, I would have serious ethical reservations.

Danke.

Not my pidgin to approve or disapprove, needless to say, but your responses are what in your shoes mine would have to be.

Don't suppose you could in the next month come up with a miracle cure for seriously advanced Parkinson's? Our friend in BC - we would love to hear of a miracle cure.

Oy, that is nasty. Just lost an uncle - a good uncle - to it this summer.

Neurology is not my area, but I have some basic understanding.

Intuitively, I suspect that stem cells are going to present two important potential impacts: first, undifferentiated or pluripotent stem cells can develop into neurons to replace the specific type of neurons that are affected by Parkinson's.

In addition, laboratory study of neurons developed from these stem cells may help us understand why these cells die, and whether controls or prevention is possible.

@visagrunt: option #3 was recently applied to my 85 year old Grandfather, resulting in his death approximately a week after a stroke left him irretrievably paralyzed, unable even to roll his eyes. If I ever end up in the same situation, I would hope that my family would do the same rather than leave me trapped in a body that could not move. With option number 2, he might have lasted for months, until a decubitous ulcer resulted in a septicemia and killed him, or pneumonia, or some other complication of being bedridden and unable to so much as roll over.

LKL,

I truly understand--I see such patients from time to time, and I see the great toll that it takes on family. These are cases where our medical ethics run headlong into the very real lives of our patients and their loved ones.

I would never question the wisdom of your family and your grandfather's physician, and the decisions that you took. Whatever my personal views, they have no bearing on other people's decisions--and I would have it no other way.

I am glad that you see the wisdom in the path that your family chose for your grandfather.

Thanks, visagrunt.

Sounds like they didn't catch the stroke in time or do anything that would have helped in recovery. People can recover most of their abilities after a stroke provided doctors know what they are doing. First 12-24 hrs if I remember correctly are critical. I have a pretty good memory.

Furthermore, what about adult stem cells made from the patient's own cells? Those wouldn't have the potential of being rejected by the patient's body and do not have the ethic concerns of embryonic stem cells.

You are deceiving yourself and giving Christians a bad name by thinking that anyone who argues against you isn't thinking.


Would it have been nicer if it was a bad uncle?

No basis to know that unless we know the cause of the CVA, the area of the brain affected, and timing of onset.

There are five generalized categories of stroke and they have very different impacts, and strategies for intervention. An intracerebral hemorrhage, for example, generally requires surgery, whereas thrombotic CVA's or more often addressed through thrombolytics. Until you have a CT scan, it's generally impossible to distinguish between an ischemic and a hemorrhagic CVA, but which point, the damage may well be done.



A patient's own stem cells are, generally speaking, the preferred source for development of induced pluripotent cells for therapeutic purposes. My earlier post wasn't clear on that.

Embryonic stem cells would likely be better used (assuming ethical issues could be addressed) in research into cause and control.

Why don't we just settle this once and for all by only using the most negative slogans possible to describe our position on abortion. Then nobody can accuse anyone of trying to be PC.

Pro-choice = Pro-murder.

Pro-life = Anti-woman.

Your're a f*****g moron who doesn't know what the f**k he's talking about.
My grandmother and aunt caught the stroke within 20 minutes max - he asked what was for dinner, and when they called him to the table, he didn't respond - and they took him to the ED by ambulance. It was a thrombotic clot, and clot busters were disallowed per his GP due to other health issues that he's had. For the first day we thought he might recover, but he went downhill (that means, Inuyasha, that he got worse instead of better despite being looked at by multiple doctors and receiving very good care) by the third day it was clear that he wasn't going to get better and that's when his IV was DC'd.


Adult stem cells have a lot of potential for the reasons you cite, but unfortunately they still cannot be made to differentiate into as many tissue types as fetal stem cells.