Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Dentists & Doctors slaves to people with AIDS?
From: geb@dsl.pitt.edu (gordon e. banks)
Date: 6 Apr 92 15:51:30 GMT
Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.

In article <1992Apr4.124757.16454@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil> rdc401@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil (CDR Peter Kent) writes:

>injuries, motor vehicle trauma etc. do not ocurr by apppointment.  And,
>since the onset of AIDs, patient treatment is almost always life threatening
>to me.  When I graduated med school (1971) I was willing to accept the
>inconvenience, but one of the reasons I decided to specialize in orthopedics
>was that I knew up front that most of my patients were not dangerously sick,
>and the thought that I would be risking a 100% fatal disease every day of
>practice was of course never an issue to contemplate.

But based on what statistical information we have now, unless you
are an extremely sloppy surgeon and cut yourself a lot, your odds
of dying of AIDS acquired from your patient are about on the level
of getting killed in a plane crash and less by far than getting killed
in a car accident.  Are you saying that your committment to driving
or flying is more important to you than your committment to help
the sick and suffering?  In your case (trauma surgery), you aren't
going to know whether or not your patient has HIV, since there isn't
time to wait for the test to come back.

>     I am not advocating walking away from an arrest while on vacation.  The
>point I was trying to make was that by invoking the mystical authority of
>"society" or "the people" to tell me who to see, and when, and for what fee,
>what was stopping them from deciding that my worth to society was too great
>to grant me the time off from all this life saving to take a vacation?
>
Someone else is on duty when you are on vacation, no?  I suppose if I
knew that my taking a vacation would result in people dying, I
wouldn't do it, but that is not likely.

>     Again, I fear I was not clear.  The point being that if abortion happens
>to be legal in a particular jurisdiction, shouldn't all physicians  who are
>professionally competent to perform them be required to do so?  It is 
>inconsistent to me that I might have no right to refuse to choose the patients
>that I take to the OR, but an OB/GYN who has moral objections to abortion 
>should have the right to follow his preferences and not take that patient to
>the OR?  If "society", our friends "the people", via our elected representatives
>say that they want physicians to perform abotion on demand, all physicians
>must comply!  Obviously there are going to be all sorts of excuses made why
>that is not the same as them compelling me to take all surgical cases on
>demand.  

If you believe that abortion is unjustified killing, you are certainly
justified in refusing to take part in the killing.  What exactly
is the belief about AIDS that justifies refusal
to treat an AIDS patient?  It seems like it is just fear for one's
own health.  I fail to see the analogy.  One person is
standing up for a moral belief.  The other is, to put it crudely,
"yellow".


>     I'll say in advance that I don't see any difference between those 2
>scenarios, and they are both unaccepable violations of my personal rights
>and freedoms.  I'll decide when to put my life at risk.  Please note that
>I am on active duty in the armed forces, by my choice. 
>
And what if other physicians who feel that this is not consistent
with the ideals of medicine decide to ostracize you?  Is this
OK then?


-- 
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Gordon Banks  N3JXP      | "I have given you an argument; I am not obliged
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu   |  to supply you with an understanding." -S.Johnson
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