Woman wins "right to die".

The SA Supreme Court has ruled that a woman has the "right to die" and the nursing home that she lives in will not face charges for assisting suicide.

The latter was the reason for the case, the home did not know if they would be allowed to fulfil her wishes without being charged. So now they will fulfil her wishes, and not feed her or give her insulin.

This follows a similar ruling in WA, where a quadriplegic man was permitted to do the same thing.

Now I may not be the most up to date person when it comes to the whole "right to die" issue, but I think I'm pretty sure that this is not what is meant by groups that support voluntary euthanasia.

In fact I think this is pretty much the complete opposite of what they want. I have trouble seeing this as a woman winning the right to die, but more as the woman winning the right to kill herself slowly. The man from WA, Christian Rossiter died from a chest infection in September 2009.

They don't say how long he was starving himself, this article suggests that it would have taken him about 2 weeks.

Is this really the option that people in horrible pain can choose if they want to end their life? About 2 weeks of not eating, possibly causing more pain? Frankly we treat animals better then that, and they don't get to choose.

If we are going to be a society that allows people the right to die, perhaps there should be a better option then this.

Homeopaths Take Heed.

'Cruel' parents jailed over baby's death is the headline on the ABC.

Thomas and Manju Sam have been sentenced to 6 and 4 years jail respectively for allowing their 6-month old daughter, Gloria, to die from eczema.

The reason she died? Thomas, being a homeopath, decided that homeopathy would be a better way to help her daughter then proper medicine.

The report that I found from AdelaideNow is more graphic in some details:

On the ninth day, concerned about a lingering eye infection, the Sams took their daughter to the Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick.

Doctors described Gloria as "incredibly sick" with a "massive eroded rash" and "grossly malnourished".

They gave her morphine for the pain and began treating her eye infection - her corneas were melting.

The sad thing is that even though these people are going to jail, I still don't think that they understand the gravity of their crime. I'm of the opinion that they honestly thought that they were helping their child.

Although this is a child negligence case the ABC article says something interesting:

Thomas Sam got the longer sentence of at least six years because, as a homeopath, he had a double duty of care.

This I believe is very important. And I suspect that it will have some rather big repercussions in the CAM industry. In NSW at least. If the above is actually true it means that homeopaths have a greater duty of care to their clients, and can be held responsible for whatever happens to them. This probably won't affect the "take this along with regular medicine" crowd, but it will affect the "don't take the regular medicine, take this instead" crowd.

Even if it doesn't I hope that people who are in the "Complimentary and Alternative Medicine Industry" take a good long look at themselves and think about the possible ramifications of what they tell people. This little girl never got a chance at life because her parents didn't seem to trust modern medicine. Would you want to live like they do, with the blood of an innocent on their hands?