End Of Life, The Progressive Hippocratic Oath

Posted by Toddy Littman | Posted on 31 Dec : 22:56 |  Comments: 0

Almost immediately, she who was the republican candidate for Vice President of the United States on the Republican Party ticket in 2008, Sarah Palin, was a master at digital communications for uttering the notion of “Death Panels.” The sensation due to the reaction to her electronic utterance, and being able to reach so many, who immediately identified with the obvious truth: Government keeps repeating, “healthcare costs are the most in the last year to 6 months of life, and anything that lessens these will lower the cost.”

There's an old expression “parts is parts” that comes to mind from this obvious look at healthcare as purely a numbers game. Of course this adage is a consistent academic assumption, imposed by calculus on everything as just a numbers game.

Obama and the Progressives, likely due to their lack of the noble qualities of hope, charity, and integrity inherent in the medical profession, have overlooked the hypocrisy created by the healthcare law. They're setting aside the historic significance of the Oath of those who pursue medicine to affirm aloud their deliberate and voluntary effort to carry on for the good of the patient, while also proclaiming acceptance of this imposition on the practitioner's conscience:

“I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

“To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art—if they desire to learn it—without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.

“I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

“I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

“Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

“What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

“If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.”


A modern oath, the “Oath of Lasagna” (the author's last name is “Lasagna”) is often used today:

“I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

“I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

“I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

“I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

“I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

“I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

"I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

"I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

“If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.”-- Available together here, http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=20909



A couple of points cross my mind.

First, regarding the modern Oath, who are they swearing too?

Notice how there is a Deity of importance to the Greek Society in the original Hippocratic oath. Now, though this may not be what has come to be true to what runs the world, there remains a certainty that if one is taking an Oath it needs to be a swearing to and before a higher power to be an Oath, a swearing to a covenant and any sort of allegiance to such covenant. Otherwise such an “Oath” is merely a statement without any sort of mental, emotional, or other registration in the mind, in the conscience, of the one taking the Oath, to which they are claiming their actions are governed by commitment to such. No binding force whatsoever in “I swear...” to emptiness. I believe, according to the same academic calculus anything multiplied by zero = zero, of course overlooked in the name of “Progress.”

Next, note the perpetuity of nomenclature specific education, to share their knowledge with those who follow, which today has resulted in a medical profession, an “association,” that excludes all others, just as a union shop excludes all others not so unionized—the union of “education” apparently.

Consider the fact that alternative healthcare remedies historically have sprung up in other nations around the world due to the lack of accessibility to reasonable and morally sound healthcare from the “professional class” of doctors in their nation—mostly due to government intervention, collectivist implementations, and the lack of productivity of the society as a whole, thereby lacking the means to afford people a way of life to which they do not need to be crooked to survive.

This is the future for American healthcare under the most modern and academic 2,800 page Obama Hippocratic Oath of Kitchen Sink Spending without any regard for the values espoused by Hippocrates.

Another thing, you'll note that the modern oath with “ethical standards” according to the Medical Association, sets forth a certainty of the doctor's responsibility beyond merely treating an ailment:

“I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

Yet, even with this provision of this, so called, “Oath,” the government, and particularly President Obama, with his variety of made-up scenarios of doctors taking out tonsils or some other body part for money, were the key to explaining why we need government involved in, and controlling, 1/6th of the U.S. Economy. Apparently, that the business-oriented cost to the doctor is far in excess of affordability for many people is the doctor's fault, according to Obama, which I find absolutely irresponsible. Obama is a former civil rights attorney who also worked for ACORN in that capacity, http://changingwind.org/index/comment.php?comment.news.104 .

He, along with others, whose litigious abilities assured higher costs for the rest of us in the industries targeted by these social justice organizations, have historically been the significant factor to the rising cost of living.

If not by lawsuit for sake of civil rights, then, lawsuit for sake of “worker's rights” and “unionization” or “sexual harassment” etc. Funny how the unions, BAR and AMA, who describe themselves as professional organizations, band together for sake of another government intervention that profits their ilk at the expense to the rest of us—even after Obama disparages doctors over and over again in speech after speech.

The most important of all notable portions of the Original Oath, in this connection, is that even Hippocrates wasn't a collectivist:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art—if they desire to learn it—without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.”--Emphasis mine, Ibid.

Seems the “death panel” is destined to happen when the doctor is the vehicle of a moral vacuum, a business model to sell services, and reliant on an income supplemented by incentives, or what salespeople call “spiffs.”

Few may know doctors are viewed as salespeople for the pharmaceutical companies, that doctors are given samples to help the pharmaceutical company sales rep achieve a distribution goal that, once achieved, justifies giving the doctor a discount, a trip somewhere, or even money. If you've ever worked in sales, you'll recognize this is a “sales quota” in a “sales contest” with a “spiff” given to the salespeople who perform to the satisfaction of the company.

And those going into medicine are stuck with this model of “Progress” and “success” while government assures the model is a granite structure, supported by the taxing power of government, and deflecting all criticism with subtexts of the situation, “...end of life” care. The numbers game is always government's. The constant throughout history, mostly of enslaved peasant, pre-America, man, is that government wants performative patronage as a privilege of its reign over the individual, and payment of homage for devising a system to steal from the producer and taxing every opportunity to achieve for their self-interest that, in and of itself by producing something, benefits mankind as a whole—a lost truth of capitalism, of America and Individual Liberty.

Government does little but expects you to perform at its beck and call, while you are paying government to order you around. “Man-Age-Ment” at its finest, making sure to grey your hair and drive up your blood pressure while ignoring, disparaging, and destroying your private rights in property, and your property in your rights. Death panels by another name, only to demonstrate the persistence of government and death as related entities to the “end of life.”

And it is only fitting they'd choose to run healthcare with government's focused benefit, the numbers game, paramount to all others, at least, according to government.

Understand that the incentivising of end of life care discussions is no less a “spiff” sales program than the pharmaceutical company would promote for one drug or another, only this time it's the government's product or service, or tax, or cost, or burden, or regulation, or conditioning, or whatever else you'd like to call centralized planning and control by national entities, institutions, and their academics, with their own agenda, (Robert Gibbs minced no words regarding a “staff shake-up” when he said “I see no significant changes, we've had a significant team successfully promoting the President's agenda,” not to be confused with the Will of The People.) who view everything according to the numbers and nothing else—a group who abhor individuals having a business and running it according to the numbers, while, making sure the people are persistently viewed as merely masses of numbers, and their healthcare “solution” reflects this point of view perfectly.

This concern for “end of life” care and the costs associated with it are the very kinds of solutions I'd expect from people who have trained themselves to use the same techniques they claim unfair of others for use in making their individual profit by Private Property and Liberty, but is fine for use of government in implementing collectivist solutions that burden the people to afford the experiment.

Yet, the analysis falls short. “End of life” expense is expensive because it is marketed as “life-saving” and assumed “a last hope and effort,” but the Progressive is sold on the literal, on the textbook and presumptions therefrom, as there is no actual experience to compare these to.

There was a time we were told to never give up when we had a debilitating disease, so much so that even people like Walt Disney ended up going for the cryogenic chamber, the hope being that one day a cure for this or that ailment will be discovered, that he can be brought back from his frozen sleep to enjoy the cure.

“Obamacare” has shifted entirely from this model of life, and the idea that innovation and invention will lead to cures, and cures will be mass-produced and cost less. His “agenda” seems to be to cave to the demands of the legal and medical unions, and their proxy representation of the “insurance company” that too is owned almost entirely by attorneys and doctors, to cater to their demands irrespective of the promise of the future and moral commitment to mankind to find cures for all disease.

It seems we're now to set aside all hope, apparently this is solely due to our lack of utility according to government, and thereby our lives have no meaning because government says so, and government will of course make sure you're reminded of your worthlessness annually according to the new Obama Administration regulation incentivising doctors to have this discussion that often—let's add another means of abuse of the government dole, another unnecessary government (taxation of individual Americans) paid-for scheme of redistribution to particular special interest AMA hands.

I have to say I am not surprised that a man who could refer to the unborn as “previable” so easily, with absolute callous disregard, is unable to see the value of a life outside of its productivity on the opposite side of the spectrum:

“...whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a -- a child, a nine-month-old -- child that was delivered to term.”--Then Illinois State Senator Obama speaking on the Illinois Senate Floor in debate opposing the Born Alive Infant Protection Act to protect fetuses who survive a botched abortion from being left to die in the inhumane way of being thrown on a pile of others, to die in a closet somewhere—some survive and live full lives, transcript here, http://www.ilga.gov/senate/transcripts/strans92/ST033001.pdf

So I guess this is “senioricide” or “geriatricide” or “eldericide,” I'll leave it to the lawyers to scribe out the right term, if anyone can ever find a way to take government to task for this act of atrocity against those whose actions of the past built the world of today and set foundations for the future. Then again, Sarah Palin seems to have said it best in the first place, “Death Panels.” The first half of the age of Soylent Green is upon us, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

Another “fundamental transformation” of America brought to you by George Soros, the Center for American Progress, and their spokesperson Barack Hussein Obama. Welcome to a perfect world where doctors are dependent upon the government dole for their incentivised funds, funds gained by promoting particular government product or service, and able to be withheld by the government when the doctor must be bent over the government's knee to assure the doctor continues to promote the government's agenda.


Thank you for reading,


Toddy Littman
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