Watching Helplessly While Someone Dies

Have you ever felt like you are watching from the outside of something while it tears you apart on the inside? That is what if feels like when you love someone and their life goes downhill while under the care of someone else with power of attorney who ignores them and does not respond to their health needs. Whatever you do, if you choose a power of attorney, make sure that person has the goodness and wisdom to actually care enough to take care of you. Because they may park you somewhere in a home and not even visit enough to understand your needs. That is a non-caring, non-seeing mis-management of end-of-life care. Someone with power of attorney has the right to block visits, limit health care, pour on more drugs so that the person is chemically bound, and even structure the information flow for all providers to that person so that the day to day helpers feel the worsening condition is only a mirror of their bad health -- not the cause. Still there is a lack of water, inability to eat food, absence of caring actions, and constant feeding of psychotropic restraining drugs.

Today we have a revolution of psychotropic drugs to treat the elderly. They generally use small amounts. However, with a zealous, hateful person in charge of medication -- this can become a living nightmare as a person can no longer dress, go the bathroom, speak, eat, drink, walk, and so forth because their medication is so strong. The head of the department of the lock down facility at UCSD Medical Hospital told us that the amount can not even be measured with a blood test. How convenient!

As I speak to the doctors, they feel bad because number one -- he is worse and number two -- we have no input to his medical care. They don't feel bad enough to stop it. They call it a difference in style. One family member would take care of an elderly person at their own home with daily visits. The other family member wants to keep them in a nice home where they can park them with few visits and a mentality that this is the end. The doctors react with surprise as we inform them -- not with action. Lawyers pass us from lawyer to lawyer because the money to fight the case resides with the power of attorney. Ombudsman and government agencies grind to a halt as they get hung up in the quagmire -- the home looks good, the helpers are nice, the person making the decisions seems to have answers like it is an advancing decline.

What do I call it? Murder in the first degree.

It takes me 2 hours at times to revive him. I'm losing my resolve and will to fight on. I don't know what to do about it. Maybe that is life. There are many seniors parked in worse conditions that have no one to visit them, no way to fight on. I do what I can and then I have to let go, go home, and sleep in my comfortable apartment with a wonderful wife.

And when my Father-In-Law passes away, what will I feel? I'll always remember those who took his life inappropriately. How they blamed him for their own problems, how they hid his money, how they sold his things off even before he could be stabilized in a home, how they chose to ignore him, and how they chose to let him deteriorate by chemically restraining him to the point where he could not live. In all I do as a practitioner, I will stand for better choices for the elderly, for all patients that may be weak or incapacitated.

I am not against drugs. I am against the misuse of drugs. I am against using drugs as the first line of defense in all medicine. I am against using drugs when there is a natural choice that is symbiotic with our human species. I am for balancing the body when you need drugs so that the drugs you take are far less. And I know that many western medicine practitioners believe the same way as I do. Check out Sanesco which represents a new generation of doctors who are balancing the body. Or look into the "The Cardiovascular Cure: How to Strenghthen Your Self defense Against Heart Attack and Stroke" by Dr. John P. Cooke and Judith Zimmer. There you have a doctor saying you do the right thing for the body and it has a marvelous capacity to heal itself. Interestingly enough, in this book they use food to treat -- that is why I like the Chinese approach so well. There is a great rash of medical books on this same topic.