Where’s are the Dr. Gregory Houses when this happens? A teenage kid was convinced that if he received a standard, life-saving blood transfusion then he would have been “unclean” and “unworthy.” Now he is dead.
Join the discussion on Pharyngula, and read the comments on this one. Right from the top it gets good:
Children are allowed to die because religious motives but grown ups cannot get euthanasia if they wish so and whoever helps them goes to jail.
The US is a really strange country.
It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s ideology and politics. Where’s a limping doctor when you need him/her who doesn’t care about these two things to conveniently knock out a patient so someone else can consent to a live-saving treatment? I could just imagine Hugh Laurie chewing him out for being an idiot - and that the only difference between taking the transfusion and not would be between a living idiot and a dead idiot. I wouldn’t use those terms, but in an episode of House M.D. it is rather entertaining.
This kid did not really know what he was doing, or understand rationally the motivations behind it and why he must not undergo a procedure that is medically standard and the end result of those altruistic blood donations that I keep unsuccessfully trying to give. (Someone will find my blood veins, gotta keep trying.)
Here’s a sobering thought - the beliefs of this poor child did not die with him, somehow, it lives on in other people. His death is merely an extended phenotype that manifests from time to time.
