The patient in the Winnipeg futile care lawsuit has died while on life support. From the story:

In the end, it wasn’t a judge who decided Sam Golubchuk’s fate–time ran out for the 84-year-old and his family who challenged the province’s medical community over who gets to determine when someone dies.

Golubchuk died at about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday in his bed at Grace General Hospital, still connected to a life support system. “He simply died,” family lawyer Neil Kravetsky said late Tuesday night.

The legal action launched by Golubchuk’s children to prevent doctors from removing their father from life support system had fixated the community and drawn interest across the country. Golubchuk’s children had won a temporary injunction to prevent doctors from removing him from life support and the issue was to be decided in court in September.

Kravetsky said that while Golubchuk’s right wasn’t sealed by a court ruling, he believed the Second World War veteran won his case just the same. “No one took him off life support–God did and that’s what they were fighting for,” Kravetsky

That’s how I see it, too (the “win,” not the “God” part: I don’t get into religious issues here.) At least the family has the comfort of knowing that he wasn’t allowed to be pushed out of the lifeboat. I have heard from those who believe that their loved ones were–and the burning pain they experience is excruciating.

I would not have made the decision the Golubchucks did. But I think they had the right to make it and the doctors acted imperiously in trying to force him off life support via coercion and resignations.

To state the obvious, the USA is losing its common culture and moral values, creating an almost unbridgeable cultural chasm. This, in turn, is disintegrating our social cohesion and leading to the me-me/I-I consciousness of radical individualism.

But radical individualism is intended for only one side of the cultural divide until it becomes predominate and can gain control of society. When the other attempts to get in on the act–cohercion tends to rule. Case in point, the angry reaction against “pro life pharmacies” by some of the very people who yell the loudest about “pro choice” values, with some states outlawing the practice. From the story in the Washington Post:

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy”–meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

Such stories call for quotes from bioethicists!

Others maintain that pharmacists, like other professionals, have a responsibility to put their patients’ needs ahead of their personal beliefs…Critics also worry that women might unsuspectingly seek contraceptives at such a store and be humiliated, or that women needing the morning-after pill, which is most effective when used quickly, may waste precious time. “Rape victims could end up in a pharmacy not understanding this pharmacy will not meet their needs,” Greenberger said. “We’ve seen an alarming development of pharmacists over the last several years refusing to fill prescriptions, and sometimes even taking the prescription from the woman and refusing to give it back to her so she can fill it in another pharmacy.”

Yet, in a seeming paradox, many of the anti pro life pharmacy advocates support futile care theory allowing doctor/bioethics committee values to trump those of patients by refusing wanted life-sustaining treatment, while pro life pharmacy supporters generally oppose medical futility on the grounds that doctors have no right to impose their values on patients.

But these seeming contradictions are not really paradoxical. Rather, they are in keeping with both sides’ overarching world views. Thus, pro life pharmacy proponents generally oppose futile care because their first principle is supporting the overarching Judeo/Christian philosophical belief in the sanctity of human life and a restrained approach to sexual morality.

Similarly, pro futile care advocates who oppose pro life pharmacies act consistent with their utilitarian (quality of life) beliefs and hedonistic devotion to utter nonjudgmentalism about personal behaviors between and among consenting adults.

But nature abhors a vacuum and the kind of cultural chaos all of this breeds cannot long be sustained. Eventually, as Lincoln put it about the great cultural divide of his time, we will either become all one side or the other. The cats will eventually be herded–both through laws passed by the states and decrees about these laws (or even in the absence of them) issued by judges. And we know which way, at least for now, the tide is running.

Women in developing countries face an increased risk of cervical cancer because they are not regularly screened for the disease, a study has found. (SciDev)

A European Patent Office (EPO) tribunal in Munich heard a dispute Tuesday on whether a method of growing embryonal human stem cells can be patented, but gave no date for its decision on the controversial case. US scientist James Thomson, who in 1998 was the first in the world to cultivate such stem cells, is appealing to EPO’s highest board over the refusal to grant a patent in the European Union for the so-called WARF stem cell. (Earthtimes)

The measure is part of a larger national debate about addressing inequities in insurance coverage between psychiatric and physical ailments. (Chicago Tribune)

The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, led by experts from ethics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and legal theory, will be the first international centre in the UK dedicated to neuroethical research. Research will focus on questions about the enhancement of cognition and mood; borderline consciousness and severe brain impairment; free will, criminal responsibility, and addiction; and the neural basis of moral decision-making. (University of Oxford)

The Center for Public Integrity said drug companies spent $168 million on lobbying last year, up 32% from 2006. The efforts paid off on some important issues. (Premium Wall Street Journal)

For years, Congress has set the price for walkers and various medical equipment, and it has consistently set them well above the market rate, effectively handing out a few hundred million dollars of corporate welfare every year to the equipment makers. (New York Times)

Silicone breast implants and botox could one day be things of the past thanks to promising new techniques that would allow doctors to work plastic surgery miracles using only a patient’s own stem cells. (LiveScience)