GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: A doctor at the centre of the capital punishment debate

sábado, 21 de enero de 2017

BioEdge: A doctor at the centre of the capital punishment debate

BioEdge: A doctor at the centre of the capital punishment debate

Bioedge

A doctor at the centre of the capital punishment debate

by Michael Cook | 21 Jan 2017 |

Emergency physician Carlo Musso is the President of CorrectHealth, a Georgia-based company with 400 employees which provides medical care for prisons. Although her personally opposes capital punishment, he believes that he should participate in executions to provide “end of life comfort measures”. “Instead of a carcinoma, that individual’s dying of a court order,” he says.

In this short video from the New York Times, he explains why he persists, despite vehement objections from lobby groups and medical professional bodies.

Since 1976, 69 prisoners have been executed in Georgia. In 2016, nine were executed, the most recent on December 6.

Donald Trump was a different sort of candidate and he gave a different sort of inaugural speech. It was short, sharp, divisive and isolationist, the kind of remarks that usually precede a massive swamp-draining project. But in one respect it was similar to speeches by other presidents: bioethics was not a major theme.

He did say that "We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the earth from the miseries of disease" -- which sounds vaguely promising for scientific and medical research.

His twice-repeated invocation of the Almighty suggests that he might follow a Christian line on controversial issues like contraception, abortion and assisted suicide.

But who knows? Mr Trump is a bit like that quintessentially American poet Walt Whitman -- "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" No one really knows what he has in mind about a range of topics. Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.