Do you believe that if life saving medical care is available, a parent has the right to withhold it due to religious beliefs? If so, where do you draw the line?
I believe withholding medical care and education is neglect/abuse and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
For example, when a child is prescribed medicine, a parent may take a look at the ingredients, and decide if the child can actually use it.
Other than legitimate medical contraindications, such as allergy or something, there is no rational basis to deny care.
Should parents who just beat their kids to death because the bible says you can kill your disobedient kids? The Word of God has few ethical problems with killing kids of any age. Do we support that as a supposedly civilized nation?
Also, the parents don't have the medical training to tell a doctor all that much, only to inform the doctors of known issues like allergy or whatever. For years, my mother told doctors I was allergic to codeine and said I got nausea or something. They finally removed it as an allergy in adulthood because they noted that was a side effect, not an allergic reaction. What else happened to my brother and I because idiots (both in the home and at the hospital) were allowed to have input? My brother was closing in at having 108 degree fever or something (maybe it was 104, can't remember) as a child. They told my parents to give him some tylenol and he'd be fine. Meanwhile, I, as a nurse, have to ship patients to a hospital if I can't get it below 100.4 with the usual methods. Adrian likes to tweak me over nurses deferring to doctors, but it's crap like that that sets me off. I can never forgive idiocy regulating medical practices, no matter who's doing it. Parents who withhold medical care should have their kids taken away just like pharmacists or doctors or nurses who don't want to do something because of their non-medical excuses, I mean, beliefs, should have their licenses taken away for all time. People who want to keep a corpse animated because their beliefs don't recognize brain death should be taken to task for it.
I am an evidence-based medical professional. Yes, the medical profession screws up, but asking non-medical people to identify supposed problems is too much.
Where is the parent murdering the child, by using alternative medicine?
If your child needs insulin and you give them orange juice instead, you don't deserve to be around children or anyone with any kind of condition that requires informed decision-making. Media doesn't help either. How many times have medical professionals see a person on TV or in movies bottoming out with their blood sugar and the response is "give them insulin" when you SHOULD BE giving them orange juice, peanut butter, glucagon, SOMETHING ... ANYTHING ... other than insulin!
In a case where a parent does nothing to aid an obviously sick child, they have neglected to care for their child as they ought to.
But in their minds, praying is not being neglectful. We have to protect children and other vulnerable people from idiots who let their pastors give medical advice without a license.
I believe that sometimes hospitals do a bad job
Should all people have access to hospital-quality medical supplies? Because that's what you'll have to do to avoid getting hospital care. Yes, a lot of hospitals suck. I loathed every trip I had to take to the ER because I disagreed with the horrible practices I saw there. However, for now, they are the only ones allowed to have the capacity to do certain things.
"I stayed at a Holiday Inn once" isn't going to cut it in the real world.
1) Asking very much money; Big Pharma is a bit maffia like. Not good for spiritual person IMO
But that is a legal issue, not a medical one. In other words, charging an insane amount of money doesn't make the pill or liquid or whatever any more or less effective.
Withholding life saving medicine is subject to opinion.
For example, doctors do not agree on what is 'life saving medicine'.
Doctors practices are not all the same. Thank God.
Doctors can turn to medical journals to explain their rationale. "Jesus would cry" people can't.
It's one thing if you are a seemingly rational adult, it is quite another if you are a child.
Indeed. A patient who can't consent for age or mental reasons should NOT be vulnerable to idiots/monsters.
Where does it say in the Bible that people shouldn't go to the doctor if they're sick?
I would imagine it would be because Greeks and Romans had doctors. I don't recall learning of Jewish medical schools. Wouldn't want them danged foreigners with advanced (for the time) surgical techniques messing up my holy body.
Besides, when Jesus healed people in the Bible, weren't they unhealable by the methods available at the time? Lepers and other incurables with no other hope - Jesus cured them.
Plenty of methods may have been helpful if they had just done them. This was a culture who believed spraying blood all over a room would "cleanse" it, after all. Also, we have no medical follow-ups for most of those Jesus "healed". That they felt better at the end of the story doesn't mean they were cured, which is why you almost never hear from the people meeting with faith healers today ever again after the show's over.
The couple was advised more than once to seek medical care, which was available.
I partially blame the medical professionals or whatever who had a responsibility to report them for neglect. I'm a mandated reporter thanks to my profession (nurse). I just can't let it go or I could lose my license if not my freedom as well.
A couple's child is ill. Doctors do not know the cause. The voodoo priest offer to cure the child.
It'd be rough, but I'd trust even the voodoo priest over just doing nothing. At least they might know some herbs or something that could alleviate symptoms, if they couldn't cure it directly. I mean, Jesus prayed not to die and we saw how THAT turned out, right?
Moreover, I would seriously think that letting someone actually die--because they didn't get a needed medical procedure? Would be a much worse sin... a sin that they took to their grave...
I would imagine it would fit under the same legal theory that if your ox is known to gore people and you didn't do anything about it, you AND the ox had to die.
JWs will frequently put forward the argument that bloodless surgery is much safer than one that involves taking a blood transfusion. That, in my opinion, is true. I'd much rather have a doctor who would perform elective surgery without blood if at all possible.
And as I've told JWs here who gripe about bloodless surgeries, if they believe normal saline works the same way as blood does, they lack far too much information to consent to any procedure.
Several years later, my mother underwent hip replacement surgery and found a doctor who performed the procedure without the use of a transfusion. She did well and recovered fairly quickly.
But what was her H&H? If she wasn't at risk, it wouldn't have been necessary. Blood transfusions, at least every place I've worked, is ordered once it goes below 8. You were on the verge of death. She, apparently, was not.
This is like saying you shouldn't need blood after a gunshot wound to the face because your mom got a paper cut and she healed a lot faster without it.
So, yes, JWs do have some good arguments for not accepting transfusions
I would say they really don't. It's based on religious dogma and severe lack of medical knowledge.
Sad. I think your experience should have told you something. Compromise is never an option. Either one is loyal to God, by obeying his laws, or one is not.
So, when Jesus broke the Sabbath ...?
So, when Kid Jesus disobeyed his parents, he should've been stoned to death as was the Mosaic Law?
Should Jesus go to hell for calling people fools? Because that's what he says happens to people who call people fools. Should he have to face the consequences of his own short-sighted judgment?
The ancient Israelites were required to "wash their hands" frequently...by their own Scriptures!
In the water so unclean they usually drank wine or beer instead? That water?
(edit: Stupid picture that won't post is a person holding up a gallon jug of orange Flint, MI water)
Yum! Bottom's up!