apeman wrote:I could see that Monty was here on the forum for a bit reading my question due to the notification at the bottom of the screen, and now he is gone.
I often think Monty has a coherent point of view even when I disagree, I do not think he views me as a crazy right winger either, so I was wondering how he would respond.
Sorry for the late reply I logged off after making my last post. I'm in a field in West Sussex getting geared up for feeding the crowd at a jousting event.
To answer your questions.
The courts sided with the doctors who had been treating Charlie since becoming ill. The doctors at Great Ormand steet hospital are the country's leading child specialists. Their opinion was that keeping Charlie alive amounted to mistreatment. Charlie was severely brain damaged and could neither hear nor comunicate. It was impossible to know whether he could feel pain or not but was on strong opiates anyway. The treatment offered was experimental, had never been used on patients with this disorder and had zero chance of ''curing'' Charlie. He would never regain conciousness and at best it would only prolong his miserable life for a few weeks or months at best if he even survived the journey all the way to America on life support machines.
To answer your question about learning from the experimental treatment. Experimenting on a live patient when there is no hope of improvement is not legal in the UK.
The reason that the courts took the decision away from the parents is that it was felt they did not have the best interests of Charlie in mind due to their understandable wish to keep Charlie alive for as long as possible.
It was a very sad case and many people thought that the clinic in the US was cynically exploiting the heartbroken parents, giving them false hope in order to benefit financially. The doctors at the private clinic in the US turned down the opportunity to examine Charlie when offered the chance back in January. When they finally examined the health records and recent brain scans just a week before treatment was withdrawn they changed their minds and said they no longer believed they could help Charlie.
It was not really controversial here as the well informed public understood the details of the case due to the months of media coverage.
Unfortunately the right in America have exploited the case, mis-represented the facts and used it to attack the idea of single payer healthcare.
Hope that answers your questions. I am not deluded enough to think the likes of StA will accept my explaination but I hope you can now see there is a lot more to it than ''the state is violence'' which is how it has been portrayed in the US right wing media.
