Doctors Should Be Allowed Mr Box To Die

Doctors are sometimes perceived as miracle-workers that perform the unimaginable. They hold a difficult, strenuous, but powerful position in our society. They make decisions on how to perform surgeries, what treatments to continue, and inevitably save lives on a daily basis. With all this control over patients, you wonder whether their own opinions on morality is an input into their decision making. In case I, an eighty-one-year-old widower, Jeffry Box, entered Memorial Hospital completely paralyzed on the right side and practically incoherent. Jeffry was suffering from a brain hemorrhage caused by a ruptured blood vessel. After discovering Jeffrey had no immediate relatives besides an uninterested sister, the hospital was forced to make the decision whether to operate on Mr. Box. Operating on Mr. Box would mend the vessel and therefore fix the hemorrhage, but Mr. Box would remain paralyzed. He would live the rest of his life in a nursing home with limited brain and physical capabilities. The doctor decided “to do unto others what we would want done unto us” and allow Mr. Box to die instead of performing the operation. In case II, a nurse, Ms. Crawford, was …show more content…
I believe because of a doctor’s critical position placed between life and death, sometimes they are obliged to play God. I do not think doctors should infringe patients’ rights by forcing their moral opinions on patients that are capable of making their own decision, but on a case by case circumstance, it might be important for a doctor to step in and make an ethical decision for a patient. In case II, the four patients were not going to gain any form of life back and were surviving because of the respirators. The patients would have remained in their same state if the nurse had not unplugged the patients from their machines. While she made a decision based on her personal beliefs, the patients were never going to regain