EUTHANASIA
When and where does it actually start? When is it appropriate and when is it not?
We typically have visions of human mercy killing surrounding the word or putting an animal down when too far gone.
This lab's Roman Catholic position on human euthanasia is that it is always immoral and unsound physician practice. We already live in a world where the M.D. physician has become the inept high priest of medicine; Where the M.D. is given the authority to murder infants in the womb willy nilly; Where human body scraps may be used among further medical incompetence and assault upon Life. Supporting human mercy killing only further empowers the god-like lunacy of the medical establishment. We already have HMO's and insurance companies trying to abandon the sickly once chronic and no longer profitable. We have incompetent medical practice against cancer and other human woes so readily labeled as "terminal". Once terminal, the next step is to offer an easy path to the grave. The physician's craft then grows from widespread incompetence to simply further murder. A very, very dangerous path to allow which historically has no heart for the retarded, the elderly, the handicapped, or the ill in any form. Once no longer economically viable, it is suitable for society to kill them off. Compassion has nothing to do with the issue; for the most proper practice of the medical arts will comfort a patient to the grave. Homeopathy has always been the deathbed patient's friend.
There is only one purpose to the homeopath's way: to render cure, not treatment or palliation. Where everything we do is focused upon destruction of symptoms and cure, the incurable case sees less symptoms to the end. They'll often die in peace or see years of great function only to die in their sleep. This is our truest objective with the application of remedies. Thus, any talk of deviation into "palliation" is a form of euthanasia because the physician has simply given up.
To the last breath and even beyond that, everything must be focused upon only cure. Even when the young and previously healthy are in rigormortis and fallen to acute ailment or trauma, homeopathy has in the past restored life to the corpse. Many other systems of medicine have awakened the cold, stiff, no breath, no pulse corpse. It is not appropriate to do in the elderly and battered fallen to chronic disease, but certainly moral to attempt in the child or soldier lost to trauma or acute illness. For them, even rigormortis is nothing more than an extreme state of shock which can be unshackled if one properly applies his craft.
For the elderly on the road to the grave, our only function is to fight that tooth and nail with the remedies so that the patient at least sees little or no suffering and remains coherent to the last. This allows more social time with family rather than sedation, coma, and artificial life support. If worked well, the dying pass on peacefully or in their sleep.
...The possibility of always doing that when medicine is practiced skillfully is why we do not support human euthanasia under any circumstance.
ANIMAL EUTHANASIA
Oh, this is a very different matter. While the previous moral line is easy to hold for human life, tending to crippled livestock and pets can rapidly become an inconvenience and cost to humans. At some point, an animal stops walking and self-feeding. They require almost the 24/7 attention of elderly humans in a residential care facility! Even if suffering is reduced or taken away by medicine, vitality lost to such a degree begins to warrant euthanasia for the sake of human convenience and finance. It is a perfectly legitimate reason to kill animal life. And so, we define euthanasia as beginning -- for both human and animal life -- at that point where the physician no longer pursues cure. We see any doctor who looks upon a patient as incurable and meant for a lifetime of treatment as simply deciding in favor of long-term euthanasia. When you no longer make cure the objective, you are killing them.
So, what is this lab's policy on animal euthanasia?
We avoid it where at all possible and practical. This has nothing to do with compassion for animals, but simply research into methods applicable to the extension of human life and alleviation of deathbed suffering.
Where some may consider it merciful to kill the animal, we usually choose to extend life with minimal suffering in order to become better skilled at providing deathbed tranquillity to the end. At other times, yes, we do kill by very unconventional methods in exploration and demonstration of the lethal powers to our craft. Killing with no suffering is easy. All you do is put the animal to sleep and then render a lethal dose or method. Dr. Quack is very good at inducing peaceful or sudden death with no trace by any number of avenues. However, because those methods deal in the black arts of assassination and are undetectable to modern science, he does not teach them to the public. Whether by touch or covert medicine, we are able to ease animals or humans into an easy death but it takes far more skill to pull them off the deathbed, and so, to the end -- even where impractical in elderly animals -- we are usually always trying to restore life and function. And, yes, sometimes our methods are traumatic. Generally, they are not but yanking a near corpse back to life is not always easy on the animals.
Our policy is, therefore, very simple:
1) Where they are beloved pets, sometimes we do mercy kill;
2) Where they are research subjects, we try to squeeze every last bit of life out of them while minimizing suffering. Even when they are dead, we keep trying. The value of what is learned and applicable to human life extension and relief of suffering warrants keeping the animals alive longer.
The greatest hardship of this policy is not really the inhumanity of it. We don't have screaming or terribly suffering animals here. Any such problems we usually clean up within a few minutes of medicinal action. Certainly, they are feeling sick and encountering other sensations we cannot understand, but, if we cannot keep them comfortable, then we usually opt for euthanasia. Where there is comfort and peace, we'll usually keep up the feeding and medicinal adjustments. The hardship comes in the tedious nature of essentially running a nursing home for old goats, other livestock, and pets! They need daily feeding, affection, physical therapy, more shelter cleaning, and all that.
Very inconvenient and costly it is to upkeep life when it is more practical to just kill, but a funny thing happens: the dying animals actually appreciate it and know you are trying to ease their suffering. We actually bond more when they're sick and dying than when healthy and running around the ranch. Their periodic ailments cured, their sufferings and palliation, and mostly their life extension and quality of life improvement on the course to death we apply to human benefit. It is from the animals that we refine our skills with rapidity and explore new waters where morality would not allow such experiment in humans.
In livestock, we experiment greatly. In beloved pets, we try to adapt previous experimental wisdom. In people, we try to adapt everything learned from tending to hurting animals. Nothing we do here would St. Francis ever really disagree with and that's our moral yardstick.
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OTHER READING
George Vithoulkas on Homeopathy & Euthanasia: http://www.vithoulkas.com/EN/gvarticle05.html