I’ve been having a backchat email with the people from the Tenet Shareholders Committee. They are enjoying the legal  attack on the Louisiana physician who is supposed to have performed a mercy killing or provided ample pain medication at Tenet’s Memorial Hospital a little too much for my taste. Admittedly they are so opposed to Tenet that this one is too easy for them. But I doubt this one has anything to do with Tenet, which frankly didn’t do much to help its patients (HCA was a little more honorable).

But where the hell was the Louisiana or New Orleans AG (or for that matter any other level of government) when desperate physicians, nurses and patients needed help? Absolutely effing nowhere. A humane person wouldn’t leave a dog to slowly die or drown in the 105 degree heat, let alone another human. And it seems to me that in absolutely desperate circumstances, Dr Anna Pou did what she felt was best for those patients.Yet six months later a grandstanding DA gets his jollies off by sending physicians and nurses on trial for homicide.

This is total bullshit. A series of studies in the 1990s showed that physicians routinely ignored DNR orders. I don’t recall any of them being prosecuted, but they probably caused more harm and inflicted way more distress on patients than Dr. Pou would have done under any normal circumstances…..and let us not forget—those were anything but normal circumstances. If I was a patient there suffering with no water, no power,and no hope other than suffering a long agonizing death—I’d have been very grateful for the relief Dr. Pou’s care would have given me in my final hours.

And now we’re going to send her to jail?!