TheSearcher: Will those hospitals likewise ignore the warnings given by others via medical alert bracelets etc. if they are unconscious when admitted to hospital?
What are the medical alert bracelets alerting for? Do those bracelets not tell medical professionals what treatment they need to follow in order to save the patient's life?
The noblood card is entirely different. A noblood order is not about saving a person's life - it is a directive to not give life saving care.
And that is where I think the comparison fails. So many people have become used to treating the JWs as though they have a special medical condition and they don't. Their condition has been created through a combination of religious superstition and bad science.
They don't have a medical condition. They have a religious problem.
What I took away from the article is that the medical doctors in Norway recognize that a person will often change their mind when they are faced with the reality of their religious choice demanding they give up the most precious thing that "God" has given them - their life itself. And they state that it happens often that a person will change their mind. That is why they want to be able to transfuse someone who is not conscious.
It makes perfect sense to me. I think of all the JWs (and others) who have said "there are no atheists in the trenches". Likewise, "there are no martyrs in the face of death". Or, at least...there are many who give up their martyr stand when they are given free choice.
I am all in favor of patients having the right to refuse any medical treatment they want - if they are in sound mind and have all the information they need to make their decision. And, that decision does not need to be based on a religious notion. Being unconscious does not mean somebody is of sound mind. They can't be - they are unconscious. The idea of a sound mind is one that should be challenged in the case of JWs.
For example, if somebody presents themselves to a doctor for treatment of a broken leg but then refuses to let the doctor put a cast on it because the patient believes that a cast will give them cancer or leprosy, would the doctor consider that patient in their right mind?
The Norwegian doctors, from reading the article, also will continue to give the patient the option of receiving blood even right up to the point of beginning a surgical procedure. They give the patient every opportunity to make a free choice and it seems that they will still continue to honor the patient's wishes...if they are conscious. It is only in cases where the patient is unconscious that it will be up to the doctors discretion to employ life saving blood transfusions.
I think it is a good stand to take. It would have made a difference for Eloise Dupuis. She was in a coma for six days before the lack of blood allowed an infection to take her life. If she had been in Norway, the doctors would have been able to save her life and she could have went home to that beautiful baby she birthed.
The JWs' rejection of blood is not a medical condition. They have a mental condition - their mind has been conditioned by religious superstition to reject life.
