Sometimes those we love die. It’s utterly devastating: but we mustn’t turn against doctors... or science

SOME things you never forget, such as watching your parents die. My father died in January 1999, at Cork University Hospital, after a difficult illness. He was 82, in considerable pain and had fallen away to six stone in weight.

In a moment of rare lucidity on his last day he asked me to help it all end. I asked a young doctor to give my dad more morphine. He refused, as he said it might kill him. I argued that he was dying anyway but he said he couldn’t. My father died a few hours later.

I was angry at the doctor and still feel he should have assisted the inevitable but, in time, I understood his position a bit better. He was not there to provide palliative care. It is not easy to be a doctor. Six years later I watched my mother die, again at CUH, after I had agreed a non-resuscitate order, with the utmost of reluctance but thinking her best interests were served.

I hope – and that word is not strong enough – that I never face a similar situation with any of my five children. Even writing that sentence sends shudders down my spine. I have faced worrying nights in hospital with two of them as infants, and while I worried about their recovery initially I never had real reason to fear that it would not happen. I trusted the medical staff – in one case at Crumlin, another at CUH – and was right to do so. They knew what they were doing.

If anything was to happen to my children in the future, particularly in a lifethreatening situation, what would I do? I know I would want to do everything to save them, but would there come a time when it would not be in their best interests? It doesn’t bear thinking about for any parent but I’ll bet it has played upon the minds of many reading about the Charlie Gard case in London, one that has moved everybody. What a nightmare for the loving parents of this child.

People, well-intentioned no doubt, wanted everything to be done for the little boy, who was critically ill because of an extremely rare degenerative condition. They empathised with the position of the boy’s parents: who wouldn’t do what they could to save their boy’s life? Who wouldn’t fight with a hospital, seemingly so callous, cold and uncaring, that it would not just seek to switch off the lifesupport machine, but would go to the courts to seek the authority to do so?

I think, however, we can take it as a given that doctors and nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital provided the very best care for Charlie. His parents in their emotional statement on Monday acknowledged as much. The medical staff did all they could to reduce Charlie’s pain and tried to improve his chances of recovery. I can only imagine that the decision to apply to the courts to turn off the breathing apparatus keeping him alive was made only after an informed conclusion that there was no hope for him, that otherwise his agony was only being prolonged. The courts, having heard all of the evidence, and not going on the halfbaked claims of some social media contributors, supported the hospital’s professional decision.

Threats

Yet doctors and nurses in the hospital have been on the receiving end of death threats in recent weeks and other intimidation and abuse. This is dreadful, utterly wrong and unacceptable. A mob formed, driven by emotion but ill-informed, full of people who think they know better than the highly trained, excellently intentioned professionals. It didn’t help, of course, that other medical professionals became involved, cynically, to offer a highly unlikely, possible false, hope of cure to little Charlie’s parents or that politicians jumped on the bandwagon too.

I accept that medical mistakes happen all the time. Doctors differ and patients die and all that. There are many examples from our hospitals of errors being made, during birth for example, that lead to devastating outcomes for children and their parents, and massive compensation payments to help pay for the cost of looking after those children with resulting life long conditions. We hear from the coroner’s court, or reports from medical disciplinary hearings, of people dying because of botched operations or the use of incorrect medication. We all know of cases where relatively simple surgeries did not work out, where the person concerned has not had their condition improved by intervention and may end up feeling worse. We hear of people being put on the ‘wrong’ medication when something ‘better’ was available, but ignored. It may not be surprising then that the level of scepticism, indeed cynicism, about the performance of doctors (and nurses) has increased. Social media has allowed information and accusations to pass and multiply, unfiltered. What was once local gossip, now gets a much larger audience. It is all creating a crisis of confidence in our medical system.

We are told that uncaring doctors do not show enough urgency to deal with cases in hospitals, don’t listen to the opinion of their patients and make decisions in a high-handed fashion. That they are only interested in their big incomes, moving onto the next patient as fast as is possible. That the GPs in surgeries don’t spend enough time with patients either – again looking to profit from the conveyor belt. Or they don’t make the right diagnosis, or quickly write a prescription for drugs from their favourite pharmaceutical company from whom (it is alleged) they get kickbacks.

Or, conversely, they won’t write the prescription the patient wants even though they may have spent €70 to get an appointment and believe a prescription for drugs is therefore an entitlement.

Sometimes this can all be true. But I believe it is most likely to be relatively rare. The vast majority of doctors, in my experience, try to do their very best for their patients. They act honestly, according to their professional training and judgment. They get paid well but they have undergone long training to get to their positions and, whisper it for fear of being accused of elitism, have demonstrated a higher level of intelligence than most of us possess. They also work in an environment where the possibility of legal action is increasingly high.

They need our support. When, for example, doctors say the supposed benefits of cannabis as a medical treatment are largely unproven at best, then I’ll trust their opinions more than some campaigning TD with no relevant qualifications.

And when doctors say children should be vaccinated I believe them, because the overwhelming evidence shows that public health during the 20th century has been transformed by the availability and use of vaccines. Yet we have liars who posit a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and who lead a mob campaign against vaccinations which endangers the overall good – and which leads to children dying. The same junk science – and ill-informed mob mentality – has damaged the uptake of the cervical cancer vaccine.

Just as I wanted the best medical care for my parents I try to provide for my own children – which is why they are all fully vaccinated. And which is why I’m prepared to trust my doctor instead of unproven alternatives.