Physician Assisted Suicide

In the movie we watched on Tuesday, the thing that struck me the most was also mentioned in class after the movie and it was how Craig was not the type of person that I expected him to be before we watched the video. He did not seem depressed in any way. He seemed more of a realist than anything. Before the movie began, I expected for him to be an extreme pessimist and severely depressed to want to make a decision like he did.  I think that, in part, was why he was a good candidate for the documentary. Another thing that shocked me was how no counseling or psychiatric evaluation was done on Craig before they went through with the procedure. To be honest, I think in his case it wouldn't have done any good because his disease was quickly progressing and making him endure it longer than he wanted goes against the whole point of the procedure in the first place. Overall, after watching this movie, I am not sure where I stand on the issue but I think I lean more toward it being legalized than before I watched the video. However, its something that will require great time reflecting on the different aspects such as religion and the Hippocratic oath before I could come up with a solid opinion one way or the other.

Physician vs. Scientist

The thing that caught my attention the most this week was in talking about research in the medical field. I was absolutely shocked to realize that studies such as the Tuskegee study and others have happened so recently in our nation's history. I understand that in the past, our culture as a whole has had some truly bad judgements on what is moral and immoral as shown by our history of slavery, racism, etc. but we never think of things like that occurring in today's society.

The one topic that I thought could use some expanding upon was the roles of physicians when it comes to research in medicine. We compared their role as a physician vs their role as a scientist but I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. Although they have different general goals with the physician's being the best treatment and the scientist's being best data, I think the ultimate goal is for doctors to pursue both goals at the same time. We talked about how the physician is not really giving the patient's treatment first priority if that patient is in the control group, but I think this is untrue because once the study is over, if the treatment was found to be effective, even the control group can then be benefited by receiving it. Therefore, I believe research such as this done by a physician is morally permissible to do as long as there has been enough background research done as well as trials with mice to ensure that the patients will not be critically harmed.

There's a drug for that...

This week in class we discussed Ritalin and it's skyrocketed usage in our country. After reading the section on the book about it, I couldn't believe how dramatically the use of it has risen. For a few reasons, I have always seen Ritalin as an unnecessary evil. I feel that it is a good drug in theory, but it gets used in the wrong sense much too often to be safe. For example, my freshman year here at Alma, one of my friends (who I won't name) had a really long paper to write for the next day and it was getting to be really last minute so one of her other friends had ADD and had Ritalin that she sold to her. I think this is a prime example of how this drug gets used in the wrong way and although it can help healthy people, that is not the intention of the drug.

We came up with many negatives to the drug such as: no studies done on long-term usage by children, that it changes personality, and that it's just a quick fix for a more complex underlying issue. I think that parents are more apt to get their child tested for ADD now than they were in the past because they do not want to be seen as poor parents if their child is doing below average in school. So in that way, Ritalin becomes a fall-back excuse. I know it sounds cliche but I feel like back even when I was in elementary school, kids were disciplined if they got really bad grades and they shaped up and started working harder to turn things around. It seems like this is kind of going out the door in today's society. As we were comparing this situation to anti-depressants, I couldn't help but think that the two are interconnected in this way. Our culture is driving us to try to be perfect all the time, leading to the dramatic increase in both of these drugs that should supposedly cure it.