Methinks CIA medical officers are trying to blow smoke up our collective arse.
They should have asked the doctors of 1881. Good enough for Garfield http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/health/25garf.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 until he died (from related causes).
Anal feeding is pointless. Anal hydration not so much. It’s something to try if you can’t get a vein or orally rehydrate. I used it once on a baby when doing a clinic somewhere remote in Africa, where we had no iv stuff (stupid, not my decision), the hospital was miles away and the baby arrived very sick and too flat and floppy for oral rehydration. It worked well enough to get us a conscious baby by the time we got to the hospital.
Also wondering when the American Medical Association is going to man up and censure and strike off the physicians complicit in all this?
As if the AMA would ever get their names… anything personally identifiable is probably classified.
I think they got their rectal-feeding information from South Park.
Well, did they ask Cheney’s “Physicians”?
It took them 3 days to issue a rather feeble rebuke to members involved after the recent report was published. This stuff has been whispered about for years, so why weren’t they issuing regular reminders to members of their 1991 statement on torture and medical ethics? 
And don’t get me started on the APA. They actually know who the architects are …
Part of this is spurious and I think it’ll come across as spurious to the kind of people who might otherwise be swayed. I mean, obviously in normal practice you wouldn’t be rectally hydrating someone - least of which someone who was healthy and had a normally functioning digestive system. You’d just give them water to put in their mouth hole. But there’s a different set of considerations here, and we might legitimately expect some different procedures than you’d see in other situations. Saying that it isn’t normal practice is true, but not necessarily all that enlightening - and it gives credence to an opposing spurious argument of the form “…but sometimes this practice is used for legitimate reasons, therefore it’s legitimate here”.
Forced hydration/feeding is, charitably, controversial in and of itself. I don’t like it, especially not in this context, but I don’t think it’s clear-cut unethical and I couldn’t really blame a doctor for participating in forced hydration as a general idea. So, to me, the question is “was this the best they could do in this situation”. I think the answer is almost certainly no - but the report doesn’t do well at addressing this question.
I mean, if someone generally trusts the government, they may assume there’s some reason, when working with a “hostile patient”, that it might be safer or more effective to have a rectal tube than a intravenous or nose line. It would have been great if the report could have, say, talked about similar instances where the same problem, with similar complications, was solved through a less invasive procedure.
When the report is at its strongest is when it’s talking about motivation; to me that was the really damning bit. Even if you start with a reasonable procedure, you can make it horrifying if you want. Yeah, we’ll hydrate you intravenously… 1cc at a time through a 1000 needle pokes.
If your motivation is causing pain, you’re already in the wrong; when you control so much of a person’s life, you’re going to be able to torture them a million ways if that’s what your goal is (and can probably do so, even while navigating around any particular set of specific rules).
(And, obviously, grinding someone’s normal lunch up and jamming it, uh, up there… well… that’s just nuts, and I don’t know where they found a doctor who would do that. But the hydration thing could use, I think, a bit more solid-built case against it.)
Interesting tidbit, at least he could have absorbed some of that opium : ) Apparently when he died he was pretty much one enormous pus-filled infection, it must have been excruciating.
The invention of the metal detector is a fascinating one, what with both the national tragedy and a personal heartbreak facing Edison.
Merry fucking Christmas to all, it sort of confirms what we already suspected was going on at Gitmo…
Jessen and Mitchell would have to join the APA before it could expel them. The APA did try to have Mitchell disbarred, but
The [Texas State Board of Practice] dismissed the complaint against Mitchell on February 10, 2011, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Mitchell violated its rules.
Thank you, didn’t know that. I’ll save my ire for The Texas Board then.
Well I definitely have to a have a talk with my doctor!
(Kidding aside… Seriously wtf)
So basically, Dick Cheney is full of hummus?
I don’t know if it started as hummus but it is certainly well-digested.
Even if most of this people were actual terrorists, this is just wrong.
I’m sorry about the rectal feeding, I didn’t mean to. An older boy told me to do it.
Why is it sexual assault just because it’s anal?
