From akcs.starkid@ddsw1.mcs.com Thu Feb 8 07:07:53 1990 From ddsw1.mcs.com!akcs.starkid Thu Feb 8 02:45:06 1990 remote from garp Date: Wed, 7 Feb 90 22:54 CST To: simsong@prose.cambridge.ma.us From: akcs.starkid@ddsw1.mcs.com (Lance K. Sanders) Subject: Article for your review >To: starkid@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US >In-Reply-To: Lance Sanders's message of Mon, 29 Jan 90 10:19 >CST >Message-Id: <9001301925.AA05707@prose.CAMBRIDGE.MA.US> >Date: 30 Jan 90 19:25:41 EST (Tue) >From: simsong@prose.CAMBRIDGE.MA.US (Simson L. Garfinkel) > >I'm happy to look at whatever you wish to send me. Simson, this article is part of a larger series of information mosaics on synergies in the life sciences: NewsCommando. I'm very interested in your opinions. NOTE: my normal Net source is down. Send any replies to the following temporary address: akcs.starkid@ddsw1.mcs.com ------------------------------------ (c) 1990 Lance Sanders GEnie: L.Sanders6 Voice: (312) 667-5958 WHY EUTHANASIA MUST NEVER BE LEGALIZED -------------------------------------- It's extremely important to consider the implications behind the recent push by medical and related societies for legalization of euthanasia, in their proper context of existing, gross malfeasance. Recall the infamous "It's Over, Debbie" essay, originally published in the Jan. 8th 1988 edition of the Journal of the AMA, and subsequently plastered in newspapers and journals around the world. It told the story of a gynecology resident who administered a fatal dose of morphine sulfate to a 20-year old girl dying of ovarian cancer. The AMA refused to identify the author (even after receiving a supoena), and broke all of their own rules in printing an unsubstantiated 'story'. It was widely considered a bizarre, sophomoric and possibly immoral effort to sway public opinion toward favoring legalized euthanasia. Dr. Arthur Kaplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota: "It's as if after having a rough night, you told someone, 'I wish I were dead', and they kill you." Dr. Willard Gaylin of the Hastings Center in New York: "The conduct of the physician in the essay is inexcusable. But the conduct of the editor is incomprehensible. By publishing the report, he knowingly publicizes a felony and shields the felon. He deliberately publicized the grossest medical malfeasance and shields the malefactor...presumably allowing him to continue his practices without possibility of rebuke and remonstrance, not even from the physician whose private patient he privately dispatched. Why? For what possible purpose central to JAMA's professional mission? Dr. Gaylin's letter was co-signed by Dr. Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the U. of C.'s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and Dr. Edmund Pellegrino of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Washington, D.C., who serves on JAMA's advisory board. The AMA's board, which serves as JAMA's publisher, gave the editor, George D. Lundberg, a vote of confidence. JAMA rejected a similar first-person SIGNED account by a Minneapolis physician-ethicist. The Cook County State's Attorney, now Mayor of Chicago, failed to obtain the name of the author to investigate a possible murder. A subpoena obtained by Richard Daley was quashed. According to an annual survey by American Medical News (06/03/88), 80 percent of U.S. physicians favor euthanasia. Another survey conducted by the Center for Health Ethics and Policy at the U. of Colo. at Denver, reported that 60 percent of physicians in Colorado would support legalization of euthanasia. The Hemlock Society, an organization advocating the legalization of euthanasia, surveyed 5,000 physicians. Of the 588 that responded, 62 percent supported euthanasia, and 20 percent admitted to taking the lives of terminal patients who asked to die. 400 members of the World Federation of Right To Die Societies gathered in San Francisco the first week of April, 1988 to work toward putting a proposal on the November state ballot that would legalize euthanasia. In March of 1989, a report produced by a 12-member committee chaired by Dr. Daniel D. Federman of Harvard Medical School (convened by the Society For the Right to Die, a New York-based group) concluded that doctors can ethically help terminally ill patients commit suicide by prescribing sleeping pills or other drugs and telling them what dose will end their lives. Panel members were also from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the U. of Chicago, Mass. General Hospital, Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, the U. of Virginia Medical Center, the U. of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, the Mayo Clinic and the U. of Pittsburgh Medical School. This type of effort to acquire the legal right to kill from a medical society where in 1986 alone, about 2.5 million hospital patients, approx. 5 percent of the total, contracted infections in hospitals. These nosocomial infections (infections caused merely by BEING in a hospital) caused 20,000 deaths and contributed to 60,000 others. Dr. Robert Haley of the University of Texas: "If you add up all the deaths from hospital-aquired infections, then it becomes one of the 10 leading causes of deaths in this country. And it's getting worse." A Senate subcommittee report in 1974 estimated that 12,000 deaths a year were linked to surgery and drug reaction, a number that has since increased. A 1980 landmark study of 815 consecutive patients admitted to a general medical service at Boston University Medical Center, found that 36 percent developed iatrogenic illnesses (induced inadvertently by a physician or his treatment). Nine percent were life-threatening or caused considerable disability, and 2 percent contributed to the deaths of the patients, according to a 1981 issue of the New England Medical Journal. A push for euthanasia from a medical society where during 1945-47, 18 people diagnosed as terminally ill were injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan project. The experiments were carried out at hospitals in Chicago, San Francisco, Oak Ridge and Rochester, N.Y. During 1961-63, 102 people were fed real fallout from a Nevada test site, plus simulated particles containing strontium, barium or cesium, or solutions of cesium and strontium, at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Argonne National Laboratory. 54 hospital patients with NORMAL intestinal tracts were fed lanthanum-140, at the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, during the early 1960's. 14 people were exposed to tritium by breathing, immersion or ingestion in Richland, Wash., 1951-52. Terminal brain-tumor patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, most of them comatose or semi-comatose, were injected with uranium, 1953-57. [AP- Washington-10/25/86]. Thirty-one years later, on 03/27/88, a French doctor, Dr. Alain Milhaud, was suspended for carrying out a medical experiment (the injection of a potentially lethal dose of nitrous oxide) on a 24-year-old "brain dead" man who was kept in a deep coma by artificial means. So many of the illegal experiments seem to center around the brain. Why? The illegal brainwashing experiments by an American physician in Canada (Ewen Cameron) are now infamous. The experiments at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute (funded by the CIA) included LSD; induced sleep lasting more than 20 days; and constant repetition of taped messages to drugged patients, such as "You are no good as a mother." The patients, six WOMEN and three men, had been admitted to the Allan for a variety of complaints, ranging from postpartum depression to alcoholism. One, who was then 18, originally had been hospitalized for an arthritic leg. Harold Blauer, a 42-year-old physically healthy tennis professional, who in 1952 voluntarily entered New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan suffering from mild depression following a divorce, received five injections of mescaline derivatives as part of a secret Army chemical warfare experiment. After receiving the fifth one on Jan. 8 1953, he lapsed into a coma and died within two hours. A DOCTOR'S WRITTEN REPORT SENT TO THE CITY'S MEDICAL EXAMINER STATED THAT THE INJECTIONS WERE FOR "DIAGNOSTIC PURPOSES". On 6/16/87, the NY Times reported that 20 patients at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Center in Queens, NY, were unlawfully subjected to research experiments on electroconvulsive therapy, schizophrenic drug therapy, and blood flow to the brain, without consent or hospital approval. Many illegal experiments also seem to center around infants and children---those least able to protect themselves. Dr. John C. Fletcher, ethicist on the medical school faculty at the University of Virginia: "In the early 1960's, scientists at Stanford University immersed 15 fetuses, obtained >from abortions, in a salt solution to see if they could absorb oxygen through the skin. One lived for 22 hours. Another experiment, at Case Western Reserve University, examined the fetal brain's metabolism of glucose; the researchers used heads severed from live human fetuses...". ["Ethics and Fetal Research"/Gina Kolata/NY Times, 07/31/88] More recently, there were the secret injections of Dilantin into 240 pregnant women at Cook County Hospital. ["Blacks hit pols over secret drug test on women"/Suzy Schultz; Chgo. Sun-Times, 7/1/88]. The experiments were conducted from October 1987, to January 1988. The state's attorney, now Mayor, declined investigation. On 02/03/89, the doctor responsible, Lawrence Lavine, resigned. Dr. Antonio Aldrete, chairman of the Dept. of Anesthesiology, was suspended from his chairmanship for 6 months for failing to properly supervise Dr. Lavine. Lavine gave the women Dilantin to see if it increased the flow of oxygen to the fetus. Understand the negative progression represented here. In the 60's, metabolic experiements were being carried out on severed fetal heads. In the 80's, similar experiments were being performed IN UTERO. The maternal death rate for black women in Chicago has been higher than that for women in Shangai, China, where the rate was 30 deaths per 100,000 births. The rate per 100,000 births for 1979-1984 in Chicago was 22.3; 13.3 for white women and 31.8 for black women. [Howard Wolinsky/Philip Franchine; Chgo. Sun-Times, 08/08/86] A National Institutes of Health committee recommended (10/22/88) that fetal tissue from induced abortions could be used for medical research (13-3 vote). This occured at the same time that an abortion drug, RU-486, was being marketed in Paris by Roussel-Uclaf Laboratories. At Broussais Hosp. in Paris, the drug doubled the number of women receiving abortions from four to eight a day. RU-486 is a steroid that inhibits the action of progesterone, a hormone that enables the uterus to retain a fertilized egg. A single tablet of RU-486 taken during the first seven weeks of pregnancy will induce an abortion nearly 100 percent of the time. When the tablet is followed by doses of prostaglandin, the effectiveness is extended by several weeks. More than 12,000 women have taken RU-486, and 15 percent of all abortions in france are done by the pill. It costs only a few dollars, compared with a few hundred dollars for a surgical abortion. Under pressure, the drug was briefly withdrawn from market, but the 10/27/88 meeting of the World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics in Rio de Janeiro (attended by approx. 10,000 doctors and medical experts from around the world) called the decision to withdraw the drug "irresponsible". France's Prime Minister of Health ordered the company to resume selling RU-486 on 10/28/88. Dr. Allen Rosenfield, dean of the School of Public Health of Columbia University in N.Y. said in a NY Times interview about the reversal: "This is wonderful!" The World Congress of Gynecologists issued a statement saying they were "delighted at the rapid reversal". ["France ordering company to sell its abortion drug"/Steven Greenhouse/NY Times, 10/28/88]. The developer of the drug, Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu, an endocrinologist, received the Lasker Award, one of the most prestigious medical research prizes on 09/27/89. Dr. John Wilke: "For this group to award a prize to a man whose achievement has been to fine tune chemical warfare against an entire class of innocent humans is simply a social disgrace. The drug has no other proven use but to kill developing unborn babies." [ Though I am opposed to the unspoken, negative goals of the anti-abortion movement, its proclivity toward violence and its ties to the political Far Right, I felt Dr. Wilke's statement in this matter was on-target, hence its inclusion in this essay. ] Prior to all of this, the European Parliment had drafted a resolution in Sept. 1988, that condemned the United States over a supposed practice of buying babies in Latin America to use their organs in transplants. The resolution was taken seriously since the E.P. consists of members from 12 countries that are generally friendly to the U.S. Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson, head of the bioethical firm, Bernadell, Inc.: "Spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) end about 10% of all pregnancies. This would provide about 400,000 bodies a year for the tissue and organ merchants, except for the fact that the fetus dies two to three weeks before expulsion so the tissues are not acceptably "fresh". First-trimester abortions are also unacceptable---the fetal organs and tissues are too immature. Therefore, the supply of fresh and acceptable fetal tissue must come from the 120,000 abortions a year performed in midpregnancy. With 8 to 10 million sufferers of chronic or degenerative diseases, demand will quickly outstrip supply. This can only lead to massive abuses, skyrocketing prices, black marketeering, exploitation of poor and Third World women as fetal-organ farms, and women encouraged to wait until later in pregnancy to abort (which involves rising complications and death rates). Other abuses would include withholding treatment for extremely premature babies in order to assure death and the subsequent harvesting of their tissues and organs. Kickbacks and finders' fees to doctors and hospital personnel would become routine." There is more than adequate precedent to indicate that the activities of tissue and organ merchants will "flourish" if RU-486 is made available in the U.S. B.J. Anderson, associate general counsel of the American Medical Assn., said on 09/25/86, that there were several recent indications of an underground market in body parts: in 1986, five human heads were discovered being shipped to the Colorado Otologic Research Center in Denver in a package marked "aerosol"; a man in London's Heathrow Airport was found carrying a suitcase filled with frozen human kidneys; a lab worker at the U. of Penn. Medical School told police he had been selling heads for $150 and arms for $65 for more than four years, etc. While medical organizations seek to obtain the legal right to permit patients to "die with dignity", thousands are dying each year without dignity, their deaths covered-up by a bizarre decline in autopsy rates. In 1970, the Joint Commission on Accredition of Healthcare Organizations decided to drop its requirement that hospitals perform autopsies in at least 20 percent of all deaths. In a study published in the 07/18/87 Journal of the Amer. Medical Assn., more than one in 10 hospital deaths that led to an autopsy was caused by misdiagnosed diseases that could have been treated. In 34 percent of 2,067 autopsies conducted at 32 hospitals, there were major discrepancies between the doctor's diagnosis and the autopsy findings. ["Bad diagnoses bared by hospital autopsies/Tim Gerber/Chgo. Sun-Times, 07/18/87] Between 1979 and 1983, a trio of studies was published by John West, a California trauma surgeon and member of the National Committee on Trauma for the American College of Surgeons. An examination of death certificates, coroners' reports and autopsies for 100 motor-vehicle accidents that occurred in Orange County, CA., in the absence of a trauma center, found that 73 percent of the deaths not involving brain injury may have been preventable. The local medical community strongly questioned the conclusions based soley on death records. A subsequent examination of 100 different records by four independent physicians which included not only autopsy records, but all relevant hospital records, found that fully 85 percent of the in-hospital deaths were preventable. ["Trauma and tragedy: sad state of emergency care taking high toll of American lives"/Chgo. Sun-Times, 10/01/89, John Grossman ] Autopsy rates have plunged from 50 percent of all deaths in the mid-1940's, to 10 percent in 1985. ["Sharp Drop in Autopsies Stirs Fears That Quality of Care May Also Fall"/NY Times, Lawrence K. Altman, 07/21/88] . Dr. Hartmann Friederici, pathology chairman at Evanston Hospital: "Medicine is getting away without this important form of quality control. The manufacturer of a toaster couldn't just crate up his product and sell it without quality control." ["Decline in autopsies seen as loss to medical world"/Chgo. Sun-Times, Howard Wolinsky, 03/12/89] Charles Inlander, president of the People's Medical Society, a consumer group: "Dead men do tell tells. Postmortem examinations reveal a lot about the medical profession's mistakes, misdiagnoses and oversights." A report released in May, 1987, by the General Accounting Office , an investigative arm of Congress, said that the Veterans Administration's headquarters in Washington were to blame for widespread underreporting of suspicious deaths at V.A. hospitals, and a resulting failure to discover errant surgical and medical treatment. At nine of the agency's 172 hospitals in 1985, the study found that 86 percent of serious "medical incidents", most of them involving "unexpected deaths" were not reported despite a "quality assurance program" started in 1982. 714 cases were examined in which the medical outcome suggested the possibility that a doctor, nurse or technician had made a serious mistake. 613 of the cases had not been reported to the system designed to spot undesirable trends in treatment. The study examined cases at Vet. Admin. Medical Centers in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, West Los Angeles, Washington, Pittsburg, Tuscon, Ariz., Altoona, Pa., and New York City. The Vet. Admin. compenasation and pension division was already under several court orders imposed by a Federal judge in San Francisco for "reckless and callous" destruction of documents in a lawsuit by veterans. The agency's own inspector general found in 1986 that preventable medical errors were causing high deaths rates at V.A. heart surgery facilities. The V.A. itself said that same year it was unaware that 93 of its 47,000 doctors had been disciplined for malpractice by state medical boards. The current medical inspector, who was not named, told investigators that he had known since 1983 that the agency's system for reporting medical mishaps was not reliable and that he had TAKEN NO CORRECTIVE ACTION. All of this occurred despite the College of American Pathologists recommendation that doctors request an autopsy on every death, and especially in the following cases: * Deaths in which an autopsy may help to explain unknown and unanticipated medical complications to the attending physician. * All deaths in which the cause of death is not known with certainty on clinical grounds. * Unexpected or unexplained deaths occurring during or following any dental, medical or surgical diagnostic test or treatment. * Deaths of patients who participated in research. * Unexpected or unexplained deaths that are apparently natural, but not under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. * Natural deaths subject to the jurisdiction of the medical examiner, but where the authorities chose not to perform an autopsy, such as persons who are dead on arrival at a hospital, deaths occurring within 24 hours of a patient's admission to a hospital and deaths in which the patient may have sustained an injury while hospitalized. * Deaths resulting from contagious diseases or high-risk infections. * All obstetric deaths. * All deaths of children and newborns. * Deaths at any age in which it is believed an autopsy would reveal a known or suspected illness that may also have a bearing on survivors or recipients of organ transplants. * Deaths known or suspected to have resulted from environmental or occupational hazards. Illegal experimentation on hospital patients seems to have become most prevelant after 1945. Curiously, in early '45, almost a thousand German scientists were brought to the U.S. by the Government under an operation known as "Project Paperclip". Most had Nazi pasts, including physicians who, for example, immersed concentration camp inmates in tubs of ice to see how long it would take them to die (a U. of Minnesota-Duluth physician, Dr. Robert Pozos, plans to publish and analyze this data). One of the most notable was Dr. Walter Schreiber, who had authority over many of the Nazi medical experiments. The FBI was totally unsuccesful in screnning out the worst of the Nazis. A conference at the University of Minnesota during the week of May 21, 1989, composed of 200 scholars from the US, Canada, West Germany, Denmark and Israel (and several Holocaust victims) expressed great concern over benign acceptance of Nazi data in modern-day science, and the occasional, matter-of-fact referrence in contemporary papers. Dr. Arthur Kaplan, director for the Center For Biomedical Ethics at the U. of Minnesota, and the chief organizer of the conference: "Nazi data pops into footnotes and is absorbed without comment into mainstream science. That I find disturbing. Nazi experiments on humans were poorly designed, cannot be tested or duplicated (!), were conducted on subjects who were weak and malnourished, and therefore, are useless to modern science." Mary Nolan, an author and teacher of European history at New York University: "By medicalizing social problems, the Nazis gave them an unambiguous cause, eliminated the possibility of improvement by social or political means and justified a cure THAT STRESSED EXCLUSION OR ELIMINATION. In addition, the Nazis used racial science to further their attack on equality in all its forms...science helped articulate and legitimate Nazi political goals, and politics in turn shaped the content of medical science." If you cut to the quick of the problem, wouldn't the legalization of euthanasia actually be the medicalizing of our social problems? Now, the problems are cost and the emotional trauma of caring for the dying, comatose and infirm. Given the country's history of extreme racial and sexual prejudice, it's not difficult to see how those problems could quickly become both more specific in terms of "targets", and broader in terms of the potential number of people killed. We have a problem on our hands. "...only the technology of the time of Hitler gave the possibility of fulfilling the Nazi dreams. Hitler invented nothing. His ideaology was so that people stopped thinking and followed orders." ---Simon Wiesenthal A COMPUTER PROGRAM was unveiled in 1988 which was being used to predict which critically ill patients would live and which would die. APACHE II (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation) was tested in 40 hospitals across the nation. Lead researcher, Dr. James Kruse, Asst. Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University: "IF A PERSON HAS A 99 PERCENT CHANCE OF DYING, IS IT WORTH IT TO SOCIETY TO INVEST THAT EXTRA MONEY?" ["Computer predicts as well as physicians"/Michael L. Millenson/Chgo. Trib., 09/26/88]. Research which appeared in the Journal of The American Medical Association during the week of Oct. 14, 1989, argued in favor of allowing doctors to withhold CPR without the patient's or family's consent in nursing homes. Dr. Donald J. Murphy, Harvard Medical School: Doctors should be able to issue do-not-resuscitate orders on their own authority for patients WHO ARE VERY OLD, CHRONICALLY ILL OR SEVERELY DEMENTED." Dr. David L. Schiedermayer, Center for the Study of Bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee: "If they don't get CPR they are going to die. If they do, they may still die, but they may live. We don't know. We can't predict 100 percent." It's quite plain that political enemies can easily be made chronically ill or severely demented. The CIA and other illegal experiments made that clear with the transgressions against non-political innocents (?). What about links between possible euthanasia legalization and rogue political organizations? Much as drug dealers launder money through banks and storefront operations, the deaths of political enemies can be laundered in hospitals via "euthanasia". In June 1987, a Federal advisory committee endorsed a major expansion of a national computer file which is managed by the FBI, that would permit Federal, state and local agencies to exchange information on people who are suspected of a crime but have not been charged. One of the most significant changes envisioned by the FBI was to "give law-enforcement officers a new capacity to track the movement of a person under investigation for whom no arrest warrant has been issued." The Institute of Medicine of the National Acadeny of Sciences, an organization that conducts studies for government agencies, was instructed in October, 1988, to develop an electronic medical record and clinical information system for widespread use. Dr. Paul C. Tang, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs and a physician at Stanford University Medical Center: "What we'd like to do is store these records on a computer so that information on the patient is available anywhere the patient shows up, from the hospital emergency room to the doctor's office." Dr. Clement J. McDonald, professor of medicine at Indiana University: "The more confidential you make the system, the harder it is to use. I don't think we've learned yet what the right balance is." Consider the possibility of a link between hospital computers and Federal databases on non-criminals. Prior to receiving medical treatment at a hospital, your Social Security number (or other identification) automatically triggers any Govn. files on you (legal or not), alerting subverted staff and agents, raising the possibility of "shadow euthanasia". M. Scott Peck, author of "The Road Less Traveled", and "People of the Lie", would consider such mallfesance concretely evil. He defines evil as a "real spirit of unreality", and believes that the "government to a considerable extent is pervaded and operates by such a spirit...it is descending into evil." I agree. I find a strong working definition of good to be that which creates or enhances an arena for the expression of life, and evil as that which inhibits or destroys an arena for the expression of life. This definition is useful when considering biologically-oriented attacks on freedoms. And recent attempts at euthanasia legalization fall under this category. Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the U. of Chicago's Center For Clinical Medical Ethics: "The euthanasia issue touches medicine at its moral center...How could a vunerable, disabled patient be sure that the doctor approaching the bedside with a syringe was there to help and not to kill?" Dr. William Fiorini, Somerset, Ohio: "I ponder the prospect that in my final struggle a similar white-coated figure will cast a shadow over my deathbed poised to quickly administer the knockout blow....when I simply rang for a companion to ease my pains." There are several main points inherent in my argument that you should take time to think about at length: (1) Even in an ideal society, giving a group the right to kill, whose sole stated charter is to heal, is extremely dangerous. As the New York Times very succinctly stated in an editorial four years ago: "Sick people start dropping like flies in societies that legalize euthanasia---followed by healthy people that don't quite "fit the mold". But granting the legal right to kill to a medical society which has failed to address and/or correct such extraordinarily, and persistently, illegal and immoral transgressions is absurd; utter folly. The same physician to whom you would grant the right to "end your misery" or "permit you to die with dignity", could very well be one who engages in the types of experimentation previously discussed, or worse. How could you tell? They don't wear stickers or buttons that declare their true moral stature. They look just like you and me. Consider the problem of the physicians who, through their inactions, make such transgressions possible. It should be noted that on 4/10/89, four Vienna nurses confessed to killing 49 patients (44 at Lainz Hospital) with lethal injection since 1983. The nurses described the killings as "mercy killings", but a police investigator said the nurses also killed patients whom they had considered a nuisance. The patients ranged in age from 75 to 80, and were given overdoses of insulin or a sleeping medication or had infusions of water forced into their lungs. Chief investigator Max Edelbacher said he met a "wall of silence" at the hospital. Apparently, 22 of the victims could have been saved had the head of the department, Dr. Franz Pesendorfer, cooperated with an earlier investigation in 1988. "And then there were the people at the hospital who had an idea that something was going on, but who had a fear to speak out. It was like Nazi times." ---Professor Erwin Ringel psychologist, author: "Austrian Soul" [ "Killings in hospital stir Nazi nightmares"/Chgo. Tribune, 04/16/89, Joseph A. Reaves ] (2) The individual examples irrefutably demonstrate a CONSISTENT disrespect for life and diversity. Which should set off an alarm bell somewhere in your head because, again, we're talking about a group of people whose sole charter, ostensibly, is to HEAL. Consider also how the experimentation increased after a specific date in time, and after a specific incident (the importation of Nazi war criminals and Nazi physicians who themselves engaged in immoral experimentation). The time line is clear; NAZISM IS NOT ONLY A GROUP OF PEOPLE , BUT ALSO A STATE OF MIND. (3) Considerations of time and money can not be made more important than considerations of human life without dire results. Yet, the APACHE II diagnostic program (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II), was designed for that very purpose. It makes it easier to kill. Other, more intense projects of this nature can be expected. (4) Eliminate the illegal experimentation, and you're STILL left with outrageous and unacceptable rates of death from in-hospital infections and illnesses of iatrogenic origins, absurdly low number of autopsies masking misdiagnosed diseases, trafficking in body parts, etc. All of which isn't getting better, but getting worse. Granting the legal right to kill to a group whose house is in such disorder, is like giving gasoline to an arsonist.