By Mark David Blum, Esq.

My gosh, what has happened to the medical profession? From the moment they swore their Hippocratic oath, they being to slide away from their duties and instead involve themselves in matters not their business.

Four years ago, at the A.M.A. annual conference, they actually entertained a Motion to refuse to treat lawyers. After all, we lawyers were the blame for the rising cost of Medical Malpractice insurance. Doctors had begun to refuse to treat lawyers and their families and even fired several patients. Hospital employees related to lawyers were also fired for the same reason.

Then came the pharmacists. Deciding for themselves the morality of administering drugs, we began to see a nationwide movement where these medically trained hypocrites refused to fill prescriptions for birth control and morning after pills. They claimed religion forbade them to engage in a conspiracy to commit an abortion.

Today, it was proudly announced that, “The University of Texas Medical Branch may stop offering cancer care to indigent and undocumented immigrants in order to cut costs.” Health care is provided to the most heinous of our social criminals, most desperate of our poor, and even to our enemies on the battlefield. But the arrogance of the Texas hospitals to refuse cancer treatment based on a person’s immigration status is plain disgusting. “The United States of America” is not a geographic location; it is a concept. Hypocrites are they who violate their most sacred oath. Refusal to treat is doing harm of the worst order.

This entire problem stems from the enactment of the Harrison Act. In doing so, we altered our relationship with our medical providers. Where they were once advisers and we made the medical decisions and where once our pharmacists would consider doctor’s recommendations but could and did make alternative suggestions to the patient; we now live in a New World Order. By delegating out medical decision making to doctors, we also surrendered the power to decide whom among us lives and who dies.

Let us also never forget the case of when New Orleans was flooded off the map. A City almost died. Many people did. One third of Police and hundreds of government workers abandoned their posts and the citizens of the City. This is all almost expected in the chaos that follows a natural disaster. To abandon your post is an act of shame. Murdering your charges so you can save your own hide is disgusting and deplorable.

In case you forgot: Horror, chaos, violence, and death stalked the streets of New Orleans. This situation did not rise from the Hurricane or the resulting storm surge. By the morning after, most of the City survived.

It was the broken levee and subsequent flood that drowned and erased much of New Orleans from view. Gross negligence by the experts, cheapskate and lazy politicians, penny-pinching government officials, and general malaise by the taxpayer all contributed to the breaking of the levee. From that, so much pain, misery, and suffering followed the flooding waters.

We as a nation have faced some serious introspection and soul-searching as soldiers and rescue crews search out the dead in New Orleans. Exposed with receding flood waters has been the toxic ugly stink that has infected our collective conscience and soul. All wonderful theories, high fallutin` moralities, and dreams of perfection are about to come crashing down hard on us.

According to the London Daily Mail, “Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals.” The article goes on further to describe how, “with gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.”

“One New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save … Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

What the hell has happened to our Nation? This is NOT the United States of America. It is not the nation of my fathers and theirs. Ours is no longer a people United in cause and belief.

Mercy killing? When Terry Schaivo had to languish and suffer for so long by starvation because doctors and religionists denied her pain relief. But when faced with the slightest pressure, a quick shot of morphine, and a dark place to go ni-ni … that is how American doctors respond to suffering and helplessness of their patients. Kill the patient because it is easier than protecting and saving them? Or, nowadays, ignore the patient because of their nation of origin.

Modern medicine is a threat to my life as an American citizen. From hereon, I join with the crowd that believes in the new American doctrine of “each man for himself and the hell with the rest of you.”

Heaven have mercy upon your soul should you become a nuisance to a doctor or the taxpayer.