Dr. Evil

Occasionally, medical professionals turn out to be serial killers. There have been a few cases of nurses who have had a hobby of murdering patients here in the U.S. Offhand I can think of a single physician who not only murdered several patients but who tried to feed his colleagues poison doughnuts, among other unpleasant acts. (Sorry, I can ' t remember his name and I don ' t feel like searching for it. I wrote about it here at the time, several years back.)In the UK,Harold Shipman was a small town GP who murdered as many as 250 patients. He killed himself in prison without ever explaining why he did it. They were mostly elderly, but not terminally ill. He gave them overdoses of heroin.Now our former colonizers have a case that is perhaps more disturbing, and quite weird. Not just a single doctor, but an entire hospital wardkilled something on the order of 450 patients with heroin overdoses. (I should point out that the drug we call heroin is called diamorphine in the UK and is used medically in situations in which morphine would be commonly used in the US.)A bit of context is needed here. There is some debate about it, but it is generally considered ethical to give terminally ill people who are in severe pain doses of opioids sufficient to relieve their suffering even if death might be hastened as a consequence. You ' re supposed to compartmentalize and keep in your mind that it is not yourintention to cause death. However, the patients at Gosport hospital were not in pain,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs