Why are DNR's not banned and why is there still talk about legalizing euthanasia?

Flowgo,

I agree. When you sign a DNR, you are giving medical staff permission to deny you treatment and let you die and relieving them from liability.

The culture of death in our healthcare system uses scare tactics and paints the worst case scenario to get people to sign these documents.

They tell you that you will be hooked to every machine possible and kept alive indefinitely, basically.

I have never, ever seen this happen! I have been at the bedside of someone who was dying without a DNR. When he died, the family made the decision, right there, not to have CPR. They knew he was gone.

I have also been at the bedside of a brain injury victim, who did not have a DNR, who was unplugged from life support, by the hospital, against his family's wishes. He was on life support 3 days.

When it is really our time to die, there won't be any machine or tube that will be able to stop it. 

These documents take the desicion making power away from you and your family and give too much authority to doctors.

You should vistit the Hospice Patients Alliance website. There is much information about these things there. It is a Prolife, patient advocate organization.

I just got this sent to me via private message on this site. I won't include the name of the person who sent it.

"iDoctor you are on the money! Hospice kills as do the pharmaceutical and medical industry today. They killed my Mom by giving her drugs behind my back on the one day I could not be with her. I believe in a holistic approach to health thru good nutrition. I just wish my Mom would have listened.
I believe today we have many folks who just want to end the burden of taking care of a parent and allow them to be murdered pretending they are doing the right thing to ease their conscience. So sad.
Take care and thanks for letting me know I’m not alone."

So sorry for what happened to your mom. I am 77 and avoid all pharma. The Dr. wanted me to consent to biopsy but any hospital or surgery scares me to death because I am sensitive. I avoid doctors like the plague for self preservation. I will let natural causes kill me but will take no pharmaceuticals. Most illness can be cured nutritionally. Examine all drugs she took, obtain all medical records of your mother, check with complaints against institution or hospital, file a complaint with whatever licenses them and talk to your local investigative TV media. Speak to your congressional representatives who can launch investigations. Best to you.

I forgot to mention in my first description that my brother was the health care proxy for my father and also the executor of the estate, and it turns out he went into the hospital the morning Dad was supposed to come home and told the nurses and everybody that he had a DNR which he actually didn't. He had a living will but no DNR. It turns out that he just couldn't wait to get his greedy hands on the money. He never showed a trace of grief on my father's death, in fact he acted every bit like he did it on purpose. I think that this probably happens all the time....trusting parents put their estate in their children's hands in their will and the greedy kids use the DNR to make it happen faster.

I totally agree with Dighby and Flowgo, my father was starved and drugged and suffered a horrible slow death after 3 wks of only being on a saline IV. He didn't have a DNR but it was the same mistreatment. I wish I'd known then what I know now. I've written about this before so I'm not going into all the details. Bottom line: he had pneumonia and trouble swallowing. They never did a biopsy or endoscopy of his esophagus but told us it was an agressive cancer of the esophagus, following a CT scan. He recovered from the pneumonia in a week, (pretty good for someone who supposedly has agressive cancer), but after failing a "swallowing test" was put on the saline IV and Dilaudid. They kept increasing the frequency of the Dilaudid until he was unable to speak (before that he said he wasn't in pain) They wouldn't give him a feeding tube because they (team of so-called Drs) didn't want to prolong his suffering. He was only awake in the final horrific time it took him to drown in his own fluids. I will never forget his suffering. I'll never forgive myself for trusting these Drs who put no value on life if the patient is elderly. A few weeks after he passed away I got his records and the first report said he should have had an endoscopy to find the cause of the swallowing problem. I spoke to the first Dr and she said, "oh, you should have been given this at the time" What kind of world is it where it's legal to starve and drug the elderly to death and not be held accountable?

Flowgo is right, there is a huge problem here. Flowgo is talking about the abuse of DNR, and everybody else is arguing about the value of it. We all know about terminal illness and not dragging a painful death out with rib breaking and extended suffering. But Flowgo is talking about patients who have, as she said, "a minor treatable problem," being given the treatment a terminally ill patient would be given....This is what the hospital did to my father, who was 92. He went to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack, because of chest pain. They ran him through a battery of tests, all negative, until the chest pains went away. He was kept overnight for observation, and was supposed to be discharged in the morning but his doctor was on vacation and didn't come in until the evening. He had a living will not to be given life support if he was terminally ill, but no DNR was given at this time because the doctor said he had no heart attack, the nurses thought it was probably indigestion. The third morning, when he was supposed to go home, I went to visit him, and found that the hospital had him under DNR order..... he'd been put on sedatives, and morphine 6 times a day, he was unconscious so he couldn't eat, and the sugar was taken out of his IV so he would starve to death. This is an example of the abuse of DNR. The morphine and sedatives and beta blockers had put him into cardiogenic shock. The same doctor said "I guess the hospital needed the bed." I made a fuss and had them take down the DNR order, and he slowly recovered from the shock and after 2 weeks he was 100% better and was discharged, but the next day he got pneumonia and died. The pneumonia was from being in cardiogenic shock for a few days. My father died by the abuse of DNR, as Flowgo is talking about.

Nojoy3 Negative, That is putting it lightly, also calling death ugly is also putting it very very........mildly in my situation. Death is not pretty and it is ugly when it is a normal death. I have had to deal with other deaths of some people that were extremely important to me, but this death is beyond anything I have ever ever had to deal with. I had to deal with the most horrible cold blooded monsters on this earth. They thought it would be good to force my mom to die even though it could not even be considered a mercy killing, although that is murder also. My mom was forced to die against her wishes, mine and my family. She did not deserve to have her life stolen from her and us. Had I known then what I know now I could have saved her life. So I will continue to spread the word of what hospital or nursing home life can be really like especially with a dnr.

No one will change your mind. Just as I respect your opinion, I hope you can respect mine and we can agree to disagree. Again I'm sorry for your negative experience.

Nojoy3 dnrs are very dangerous and yes I do dare to speak my mind about this subject after what happened to my mom because I want people to know just how dangerous they are. I have found out that my family was not the only family this has happened to. The way you describe dnrs is the way they are supposed to be used but that is not the case in to many situations. They are abused. If you read all of my posts you will find out for yourself.

DNR stands for DO NOT RESUSCITATE and that means if you should stop breathing or your heart would quit beating no one will attempt to revive you. It does not mean that you will not be cared for nor does it mean that a potentially treatable disease won't be treated.
I have been an RN for years and the kindest thing I've seen happen in the medical world are DNR orders. When I first became a nurse we did not have DNR orders. We had to try and save everybody! I remember old folks coming from the nursing homes, bedridden from multiple strokes and we'd be sticking IVs in them and tubes in every orifice they had and when they coded we'd code them and for what reason? So the could go back to the nursing home and do it all again next week. It was horrible, it was cruel. I remember thinking "we're kinder to our dogs than we are to these people".
Death no matter how it comes is ugly. There is no dignity in it. It's hard to die and hard to watch a loved one pass on as their body shuts down.
I'm sorry you and your family had a negative experience. You don't have to be a DNR pt, that is your right. But don't you dare try to take my DNR choice away from me or my family!!!!

Flowgo is absolutely correct, in her situation and in my father's situation.
MaggieMarshall, my Dad was on morphine, but still was aware, semi-awake, as he "drowned in his own mucosa"-as you worded it.
If these medical travesties happened to Flowgos mother and my father, I'm sure they have happened to other people, and are happening at this very minute to some innocent, trusting elderly person.
This has to stop, and just because the Drs judge an elders life to be of less quality than normal, it's no reason to kill them off under the guise of mercy.
If the patient would be content to live with a feeding tube, then their wishes should be carried out.
I'm sure my Dad would have chosen a less " quality " life, instead of the excruciatingly slow, drowning in his own fluids, death that the Drs "mercifully" subjected him to.
Hospitals, in my experience, treat the elderly like 2nd class citizens.
Of course I don't mean patients to receive "bone breaking" CPR, but this wasn't even in my father's situation.
He still suffered greatly, he was looking at me in fear, especially the last night.
One month prior to the hospital admission, he was out driving my Mom around and working in his garden.
I went back for his hospital records a few weeks after his death and spoke to one of the Drs and voiced my concerns. She said, "he would have only gotten sick again". What happened to the cancer, she diagnosed? And from all my research since, a mass in the esophagus could be a variety of nonmalignant things, and a biopsy is the only definite way to know. As she looked over the records with me, the best she could come up with was the " he would have only gotten sick again" remark.
Just because she decided his quality of life didn't meet her standards, he wasn't allowed to live it.
What about the sanctity of life, for someone who would've preferred it, over a forced death sentence?

Carol Bradley Bursack During my research I have found many to many people who have been through the same thing I have been through with my mom. There are even cases where a dnr is put on the patients chart by medical staff without the consent of a patient or family. It is to easy for medical staff to abuse a dnr such as the case with my mom. There was even a time when my mom was in intensive care trying to recover from a drug overdose and before the nurse knew I was around she was yelling out dnr and the drug she was not supposed to have at the same time when I came over to her she said oh you can say no to that drug it was on her charts that she could not have it and she was trying to recover from a drug overdose. This happens more than you know. There are other cases where doctors say there is no hope but the family refuses to let the person go and the person down the road recovers. I just think dnrs are very wrong.

MaggieMarshall Yes I do know what I speak, I saw the medical staff use my moms dnr so they can give her as much deadly sedatives as possible when cardiac arrest happens they don't have to do a thing. dnr does not mean you are supposed to try and make the patient go into cardiac arrest and then not give any cpr but unfortunately that is what it means now.

Maybe I can save a life with my anger, yes I am very angry and shocked till this day. Time does not heal my situation. My mom had detailed advance directive, but she did not mention to not severely drug her into a vegetative state and when she is in cardiac arrest from the overdose then she does not want cpr. unfortunately she forgot to mention that she did not want to be forced to die instead of just dying on her own, had she mentioned that then maybe the medical staff would have had some mercy, not really sure though. What would you suggest maybe haldol so I can be with my mom. I can deal without deadly sedatives thank you do you really think it is fun to try and get me upset.

You don't understand a couple or three things. We're all going to die. None of us are getting out alive. It's often very difficult to die. Not that it's not time, but the human body is a remarkable machine...forever trying to compensate to prevent the inevitable. No matter how hopeless the fight.

Morphine makes for an easier journey. Should I lie there conscious gasping for air...filling up with mucosa...wide-eyed and afraid...perhaps in excruciating pain? Or should nurses administer the sweet release of drug induced sleep?

Ever wonder what happens when attempts are made to resuscitate an old and frail body? Many broken bones for one. A blitz physical assault. So that frail old body can die again tomorrow.

You know NOT of what you speak.

If the patient died five years ago, as in flowgo's situation, and you are still engulfed in anger and despair, please get some medications for a deep and darkening depression. Get some expert counseling for a grief that has trapped you in a deep dark place. You want to live a better life.

DNR me. POLST me. NO CODE me. When I am old and frail, don't put me through the rib-breaking ordeal of CPR. Don't make me live too long at any cost.

I have an uncle who at this very minute is dying. He has conditions that would be operable in a much younger man, but he is too frail to survive surgery. So he is dying. He will likely enter hospice soon, where medical treatments other than pain control and comfort care stop. Eventually he will stop being fed to avoid prolonging the natural shut-down processes and extending his agony. This is not starving someone to death. Providing nutrition at this point accomplishes nothing really.

Having a healthcare living will/advanced directives is the only way to make sure your wishes are on record, whether it's "do very little" or "do everything there is".

I don't expect my family to be rational about this while in the middle of the trauma and drama. I should hope they miss me. I should hope I've lived in a way that seeing me go will be sad, but my death will be part of my life just as much as my birth was. It's bound to happen, and I'd like to have some say over it where possible.

Doctor's don't even want aggressive end of life care interventions they may very well recommend to their own patients. This is an NPR Radiolab story: www.radiolab.org/story/262588-bitter-end/

Flowgo, you're mother's situation is not the norm. I can see why you are shocked and angry.

In most cases DNRs serve a positive purpose for those of us who no not wish to linger in an artificial "life" attached to machines. There's a movement to change the words to what they truly mean which is allow natural death (AND).

To be healthy and drugged into a coma for no reason is unconscionable no matter what the person's age and that should be a legal matter. But to be at an age where the cure for the disease is worse than allowing nature's course and offering comfort care (as noted by Captain) is completely different. Many times the "cure" is far worse than allowing natural death and then, after the "cure," the person dies anyway.

I'm shocked by your story, but I don't believe that is what DNRs are all about. I'd be horrified if I were left unable to make that choice should my health be in such a state that keeping my body alive will simply trap my soul.

Again, I'm not only saddened but shocked by your story. My deepest condolences.
Carol

Thank you jeaneqibbsThe sad thing is when a person reaches a certain age they are considered being past there age expectancy (terminal) It does not seem to matter if they are a healthy person. It was horrible how they used my moms dnr to give her as much sedatives as possible. The investigators now recognize that she was given enough to cause great harm and kill and she was given these sedatives even though she was not terminal or any where near that. this is why I hate dnrs and if it was up to me they would be banned. My mom did not asked to be put into a coma with deadly sedatives and then labeled as being a vegetable because of her age only. Then give her enough deadly sedatives to try and get her to go into cardiac arrest so staff would not have to resuscitate her no that was the opposite of why she had a dnr. If the elder is in a hospital there should always always be someone one like a friend that is a nurse or doctor but family you can trust only.

Lets insert the gender equation here . if a 90 yr old woman has a terminal condition and insists on being kept alive with any and all measures its because she isnt done making people around her miserable
if a 90 yr old man has a terminal condition and it looks like he'll die before his wife does , its because he WANTS to die .
my mother was diagnosed with ( among other things ) a mass on one of her kidneys at the age of 81 . she refused any further treatment . i didnt understand her decision but when i started reading up on the subject i found what freq said to be the case . an 81 yr old person will not survive something as rash as kidney surgery and if one kidney were removed the other would stress out and become nonfunctional in a short while .
as far as the dnr decision being left totally to the families -- my family knows about as much about medicine as i know about tact . id like life sustaining decisions left up to me and the docs if possible .

notenoughtime, so sorry to hear about your Dad's passing.

Please note, depending on the age of the patient, elderly patients normally do not survive major surgeries, their heart cannot take the stress like it can for someone much younger. It's not a write off, it's just reality. Sadly he probably would have died during surgery.

Radiologist and Oncologist can tell from a CT scan if they see large cancer cells in the x-ray, and could tell if the cancer had spread to other parts of the body thus why put an older patient through the ordeal of doing a biopsy when surgery couldn't be done. Biopsies are an extremely painful ordeal in itself.

Sounds like your Dad was placed in hospice.... thus the reason for no food or water.... just pain meds to keep the patient comfortable as possible depending on the illness.

Sadly cancer can strike without warning. I, too, was very healthy, and wham was diagnosed with cancer.

Flowgo, I absolutely agree with you. My Dad didn't have a DNR, but even so, he was written off because of his age. He was starved over a period of 3 weeks, and then sedated to death. He too wanted very much to live and had no cognitive problems. The Drs just decided from one ct scan that the mass in his esophagus was malignant (no biopsy, even though we were promised there would be) A mass isn't always malignant, only a biopsy can tell. No food, no feeding tube of any kind for 3 weeks. He was originally admitted for pneumonia, which he recovered from, even while starving. The Drs said it would be useless to give him nutrition because the "cancer" would get 90% of it. It's ridiculous that we believed them, we were in shock because my Dad was always very healthy. Outside of the antibiotics for the pneumonia that he recovered from, Dad was only on a salineIV and the ever increasing amounts of dilaudin/morphine (he told me he wasn't in pain) that eventually caused his death. The last night was horrendous, his lungs were full of water, and he slowly drowned to death, gasping and afraid. What an end to such a life that was full of honor and kindness.

flowgo, I respectfully disagree. There comes a point where keeping the body working just doesn't serve the patient as a person. It wasn't that long ago that medicine couldn't do that, and people would never have made it as long as they now do. A DNR, especially for someone with a terminal illness, spares everyone the emotional and financial cost of prolonging the inevitable. .
Two days ago, we had a vet come to the house to put down our cat, who had an untreatable spinal tumor and who was increasingly miserable and could no longer walk or excrete waste. We can do that for a pet, but we can't do it in cases where prolonging physical life is causing true heartache for everyone involved...MOST ESPECIALLY THE PATIENT.
You are free to hold your own views. Please honor that others see things differently, and have good reason to.

DNR was my mother's choice, it is presently my father's choice and it is my choice for me. Continuing to resusitate and pound the heart back to life only does more damage to the vital organs and brain function of a human being. And yes, it's very painful to deal with.

to igloo if my mom would have passed on her own without being forced to pass and been given comfort measures like dnrs are supposed to be used for, then I would have most likely been ok by now. I still would have been upset as when other loved ones in my family have passed, but I would have been ok by now since this happened over a year ago. Our family and friends are still grieving over how she passed. We have never been able to grieve about the loss of my mom since we are so angry and still traumatized over how she was forced to pass.The way my mom was forced to die as she struggled to live is what is causing me so much pain.The medical staff rarely showed her any mercy.One drug they gave her would have been great if she had another problem. It was a great drug for other problems but not hers.This drug instead killed her since it caused her problem to get worse.She still continued to fight so hard for her life, since she loved life and had always taken very good care of herself and was in great physical shape.The nurses had even told me that she should have continued on the drug that had originally helped her.They knew she was not supposed to be on the drug that they finished her off with, since it was deadly for what she had. Unfortunately, those were what they call staff comfort measures. It is just like antibiotic is good for a bacterial infection but you would not give that to someone who has a yeast infection since it will cause the yeast to mutiply.This is especially true if the person was in septic shock from the yeast infection. There were also sedatives she was not supposed have. A doctor had told us she should never be on them since she had a sensitivity to them but yet she was constantly given them.The black box warning did honestly apply to my mom but these warnings were completely ignored by the staff which then contributed to her death.The staff tried to kill her off with the sedatives alone but mom fought so very hard. There were so many things the staff did that made us believe that she was killed on purpose.They can get away with it since she had a dnr. My mom would have never ever signed up for a dnr had she known how easily they can be abused and how dnr patients can be ignored or even forced to die. Medical malpractice is very difficult since the medical staff are very well protected. When a lawyer is aware of the dnr the lawyer will loose interest in the case and basically say that the dnr killed her. There needs to be laws that are put in place to protect patients.

DNR's are by choice. Personally I find DNR and any advance directives to be as central for planning for my future as saving for retirement, exercising daily, etc.

Regarding black box warnings, drugs in this group are essential for dealing with diseases. If bird-flu had gone to pandemic stage, Cipro would have been flying off pharmacy shelves as it is a front-line antibiotic. It is a black box drug. Warfarin
(Coumadin) is another bbd that is probably the best anticoagulant on the market.
BBD's are serious meds that do life-saving serious good. Is there a risk, yes, but there is a risk to everything we do.

If you think your mom died due to medical malpractice, then seek a legal remedy.

It's obvious that her death has left you bereft. Perhaps it would be good for you and your family to go to grief counseling to cope with the loss and mourning.

It is hard enough to loose your beloved mom, but in my case it makes things much more difficult because you just don't believe that this kind of thing can actually ever happen to you.You only expect this to happen on TV or the news. I really want people to be well aware of what does happen.Thank you Jeann for the understanding and caring comment about the loss of my mom. Knowing that people care can really help during this very devastating time.

I just read your profile. I understand why you are so angry. You feel that this happened to your mother. My sincere condolences on your tragic loss.

to Maries mom thank you and I am very sorry for your loss too

flowgo, you sound very angry, and like you have specific cases in mind. If you have evidence of murder, surely you have/are going to the police with it.

My husband has DNR in his file. He has been hospitalized twice since then and I saw absolutely no evidence of poor practices (other than hospitals are not equipped to handle dementia patients -- with or without DNR.)

My fear is that a hospital with particular religous affiliation might not honor the DNR decision. I have talked to the hospital administrators of the places that would most likely treat my husband to be reassured on this point.

All vulnerable adults (which is just about every adult in a hospital, at least for the duration of their illness) needs an alert and smart advocate, to see that the patient's wishes are honored.

I suggest that a hospital that is intent on murdering patients for their convenience would finds ways to do it with or without DNR paperwork. If such hospitals exist, it would take more than banning DNRs to stop them. (But the hospitals would make more money by prolonging life, so I'm not sure what the motivation would be. Hmmm.)

I am glad you have the right to not have DNR in your medical file. I am glad I have the right to have it. It is a very personal decision and I would hate to see it legislated.