NHS intentionally kills off at least 130,000 elderly patients every year

Sunday, June 24, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: NHS, elderly patients, death panels

(NaturalNews) A controversial end-of-life care program that was allegedly designed to improve "quality of dying" for terminally ill patients in the U.K. is being widely abused as a form of back-door euthanasia, says a prominent doctor and professor. The U.K.'s Daily Mail reports that the program, known as the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), is now responsible for killing off at least 130,000 patients in the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) every single year.

LCP was developed, at least on the surface, as a way for hospitals to help dying patients pass on with dignity, and without pain. The idea is that, should a nurse or doctor suspect that a patient only has hours or days to live, LCP can be implemented to slowly sedate the patient and gradually kill him. Because a steady stream of morphine or other powerful painkiller is being administered the whole time, the patient allegedly dies in a much more pleasant state than if left to the normal dying process.

Is LCP a legal cover for 'death panels?'

But many healthcare practitioners have apparently been improperly assessing patients as being terminally ill, and summoning them to early death based on illegitimate, third-party opinion. Such patients may simply be troublesome for hospital staff, for instance, or merely taking up an extra bed, which prompts the careless or even sinister implementation of LCP on patients that may have gone on to live otherwise healthy lives if they had been allowed to recover.

Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist at East Kent Hospitals and Professor Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, says he has personally witnessed the LCP program, which claims to be a "care pathway," be used to deliberately kill patients that were not terminally ill. Pullicino says he personally saved the life of one 71-year-old man who had already been put on the LCP program -- the man, who Pullicino had to work very hard to get off LCP, ended up living another 14 months.

"The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway," says Pullicino. "Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP. Patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition. Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically."

Centralized healthcare further empowers doctors to assume the role of fate

The fact that it is not scientifically possible to determine how much time a patient has left to live calls into question whether or not LCP, or programs like it, are ever appropriate in any patient situation. There really is no way for any individual to truly know the death timeline of another person, after all, as someone who appears gravely ill could eventually recover, while a healthy-looking person could drop dead at any moment.

These are situations where the final life or death decision should be left up to fate, not man. And yet man-made "death panel" programs like LCP are the only logical endgame of government-run healthcare programs, which also includes Obamacare in America. Centralized, government-run healthcare systems by nature degrade individual human lives into nothing more than fluid economic factors that are assessed and valued solely on their utility rather than on their intrinsic worth as human beings.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://gulfnews.com

http://www.mcpcil.org.uk/liverpool-care-pathway/