Jul 26

Patients rights in America

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Let’s focus on Wisconsin here, as a microcosm of the morphing healthcare system that’s redefining health and care and prompting an effort to examine it all carefully.

The Wisconsin bishops released a statement warning people about the spreading use of Physician (or Provider) Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). They did it in a carefully but clearly worded pastoral letter Upholding the Dignity of Human Life.

A POLST form presents options for treatments as if they were morally neutral. In fact, they are not. Because we cannot predict the future, it is difficult to determine in advance whether specific medical treatments, from an ethical perspective, are absolutely necessary or optional. These decisions depend upon factors such as the benefits, expected outcomes, and the risks or burdens of the treatment.

A POLST oversimplifies these decisions and bears the real risk that an indication may be made on it to withhold a treatment that, in particular circumstances, might be an act of euthanasia. Despite the possible benefits of these documents, this risk is too grave to be acceptable.

Finally, the design and use of the POLST document raises concerns as to whether it accurately reflects and protects a person’s wishes.

These have all been concerns for years in the medical/legal system, which became a riveting national debate while Terri Schiavo was being starved and dehydrated to death. It also became a discussion around a lot of family tables across the country at that time, causing a lot of media coverage of things like ‘living wills’ and a lot of Americans to rush to arrange them or sign already prepared ones that appeared online in a number of places.

Don’t do that, say the bishops and the experts at the Patients Rights Council and Terri’s Life and Hope Network, among others.

The pastoral statement:

We encourage all persons to use a durable power of attorney for health care. For those who are age 18 or older, completing this document allows you to appoint a trusted person to make health care decisions on your behalf if a situation arises in which you cannot make these decisions for yourself. It is important to discuss your wishes and Catholic teaching with the person whom you appoint and to choose someone who will make health care decisions based on these principles.

The Patients Rights Council site is loaded with resources, for people of any state in the nation and in life and belief system. Just don’t let others take your treatment decisions away from you and determine them for you, in the absence of your advance directive. PRC’s Rita Marker told me people can get a Protective Medical Decisions Document at their site, no charge (suggested donation encouraged). More on that here.

I’ve worked for years with Terri Schiavo’s family, since they were trying to save her life and just take her home and care for her. They devoted the rest of their lives to helping other families avoid that ordeal with information and resources. And first hand relief efforts.

And still in recent years and even months and weeks, I’ve known or known of families caught in the pressure of having to make medical decisions they weren’t prepared for, wondering who had what authority (or why they didn’t have the rights they thought) while their loved ones died.

But none of them were from TMI. We can’t be too well informed.

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Nov 28

Collin Raye, voice for the voiceless

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Health care practice has already posed threats to the disabled and cognitively impaired. Now, healthcare law is putting the lives of the most vulnerable people at risk. Who’s speaking out for ‘the least of these’?

Collin Raye, for one.

Collin Raye is the new national spokesperson for the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, which was established following Terri’s death in 2005 by starvation and dehydration. The group is a non-profit dedicated to helping persons with disabilities, and the incapacitated who are in or potentially facing life-threatening situations. He travels the country sharing his personal story and cherished music at both concert venues and prolife conferences and political events.

His personal story is poignant, twice over, in his experiences with his wife and granddaughter. He memorialized her and their experience in the profoundly beautiful song ‘She’s With Me.

He told me on radio that it was “the closest thing to a Job moment I’ve ever had”, when Haley passed away at the age of nine. And that the issue of health care for the cognitively impaired and disabled, the most vulnerable among us, “is a vital topic that no one else is talking about.”

At least we are.

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Oct 23

Pink ribbons everywhere

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They’ve been evident lately on most major league baseball and football teams. And their advertising. They’re so ubiquitous, those pink ribbons are seemingly on most products in the stores right now.

So I’m grocery shopping and every aisle features food products that have somehow worked the pink ribbon onto its packaging. In fact, nearly every aisle I turn the cart into has a special display of these products to catch shoppers’ attention. Caught mine, because I write about this every year at this time. And interview people on radio in between Octobers…

I stop at one display and really look at it. ‘Okay, I’ll pay the attention you ask for. What is it you’re promoting?’ I think…

The signs all say the same thing. ‘Breast Cancer Awareness Month’. I looked at that and wondered, what does that mean?

Okay, we’re aware. But being aware of this dreaded disease is just the beginning, as it is with any form of cancer or any other affliction.

What needs an awareness campaign is the link of breast cancer to abortion.

A microbiologist says there are so many published studies confirming the link between induced abortion and breast cancer that he plans to publish one every day on his blog until he’s mentioned them all. It will take Dr. Gerard Nadal so many weeks to cover them all, the blogging will continue until early next year.

Nadal, who has a has a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from St John’s University in New York, has spent 16 years teaching science, most recently at Manhattan College.

He will report on one abortion-breast cancer study daily until he has exhausted all of the abortion-breast cancer studies and he anticipates he may be reporting on these studies as late as January or February of 2011.

“Today begins the inexorable presentation of the scientific literature on the abortion/breast cancer link,” Nadal writes. “Women’s lives depend on us getting the truth out to them. In short order we’ll generate plenty of pros armed with the simple truth of science!”

Yes, let’s have awareness.

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Oct 02

Dear Department of Health and Human Services

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You are wielding unchecked power, and you are out of control. Please pay heed.

A couple of months ago, HHS announced a new “preventive care” package of services for women to be included in insurance coverage that defied reason and morals. It drew plenty of outcries for review and oversight. HHS left open a window of time for “public comment” that closed at midnight September 30th.

In the waning hours of that alleged openness to reaction by American citizens and organizations and institutions, more and more voices have come out criticizing that federal department’s decision to require most health insurers to cover contraceptives, the morning-after pill, and elective sterilization.

The US Bishops Conference has been on this major campaign of awareness and initiative of engaging Congress for some months, since word got out that HHS was even considering such a move. It caught on, across the country.

How open will HHS be to the public input they got? Two thoughts…

The first is how inconsiderate they were to a broad spectrum of opinion when devising this plan to begin with. HHS did not consult the nation’s largest provider of healthcare services, which is Catholic hospitals and medical centers and institutions. The narrow group they convened foretold the conclusion.

The medical committee behind the federal government’s impending mandate that insurers cover birth control without co-pay is populated by board members of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, as well as major donors to politicians favoring legal abortion.

The pro-life organization HLI America says public records show the ideological roots of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee, which recommended virtually all private health insurers pay for FDA-approved contraception as essential “preventive care” under the new health care law, including drugs that can cause early abortions.

IOM, a non-governmental organization tapped by federal health officials to recommend the new guidelines, describes itself on its website as “provid[ing] unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers.”

That flies in the face of truth. Here’s the breakdown:

Among the 15-member IOM Committee on Preventive Services for Women are Claire Brindis, a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation; Angela Diaz, former board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health; Paula A. Johnson, Chairwoman of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and upcoming recipient of NARAL’s 2011 “Champion for Choice” award; Magda G. Peck, the former board chairwoman of Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs; and Alina Salganicoff, Vice President and DIrector of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which strongly favors abortion and contraception on demand.

In fact…

Dr. Anthony Lo Sasso, the lone member of the IOM committee dissenting from the report, concurred that the findings were tainted by advocacy goals.

“Troublingly, the process tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determinations filtered through a lens of advocacy,” he wrote. “An abiding principle in the evaluation of the evidence and the recommendations put forth as a consequence should be transparency and strict objectivity, but the committee failed to demonstrate these principles in the report.”

This is the time to right that. Which brings up the second thought:

We have ample evidence of the body and weight of public comment HHS received in the final days last week. And it’s not going to stop becoming public.

There’s a large alliance of professional organizations who issued this. Bottom line: the mandate violates the US Constitution, among other things.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center issued this letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. It is exhaustively detailed, but gets to the same bottom line. The mandate is unconstitutional.

In summary, treating pregnancy as a disease that should be prevented is medically, socially, and anthropologically inaccurate and sexually biased. By treating pregnancy as a disease to be prevented one can only conclude that the treatment for such a “disease” is an abortion. Thus, the Rule is acting against the very provision in the PPACA and its legislative history, that state that abortion is not one of the “preventive services” to be included in the “services” provided. Yet the Rule clearly mandates coverage at no cost for contraceptives and sterilizations to prevent the “disease” of pregnancy, genetic screening of existing pregnancies whose ”treatment” will for some include abortion, and abortifacients which cause the termination of the newly conceived human being. These and other contraceptives are presented inaccurately as a deterrent to unplanned pregnancies, when the very data presented by the IOM to support such claims belie these claims. Empowering women to know and act with their bodies to manage their fertility in a responsible manner is the real answer to the physiological, social, and psychological problems created by a culture encouraging women to engage in unhealthy life styles. Then, forcing others to participate in and to pay for the life style choices of others, which clearly and demonstrably have been detrimental, is the utmost violation of the United States Constitution.

In the waning hours of “public comment”, Notre Dame joined the swelling chorus of voices.

President Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., wrote in a Sept. 28 letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the mandate places the school in the “impossible position” of having to defy Church teaching…

The mandate “would compel Notre Dame to either pay for contraception and sterilization in violation of the church’s moral teaching, or to discontinue our employee and student health care plans in violation of the church’s social teaching,” Fr. Jenkins said.

Notre Dame joins 18 other Catholic universities and colleges, as well as the U.S. bishops and numerous other Catholic organizations that have reacted strongly against the proposition.

Like the Catholic University of America.

If we comply, as the law requires, we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful — sometimes gravely so. It seems to us that a proper respect for religious liberty would warrant an exemption for our university and other institutions like it…

It does not take a college education to see the hypocrisy in offering to pay for the very services we condemn in our theology classes and seek forgiveness for in our sacraments. It should not be the business of the federal government to force Catholic schools and other Catholic institutions into such a collective violation of our own conscientious beliefs.

The list goes on. Countless individuals wrote HHS. Like nurse Nancy Valko, a noted bioethics expert and human rights activist.

I have been an RN for 42 years and I currently work in an intensive care unit in St. Louis, Mo. I must protest the current mandate regarding women’s health and conscience rights. Conscience rights serve not only a bulwark against workplace discrimination and harassment for us health care providers but also as a protection for our patients. When we cannot refuse to participate in or even discuss practices we deem unethical, we also deprive our patients of informed choices based on comprehensive information. When health care providers become mere technicians of government mandates, we cease to be ethically grounded professionals dedicated to the welfare of our patients. Right now, the topic is abortion and contraception but the dismantling of conscience rights will inevitably extend to other areas such as assisted suicide and euthanasia. This leaves our patients vulnerable to coercion, manipulation and even death in an ever-changing health care system. I implore you to rethink this mandate.

So now what? HHS can close their window and tune out or reconsider. But the real public comment is only growing, and they cannot control that.

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Sep 12

The ‘mission creep’ of euthanasia

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It was never legitimate. Expediency disguised as compassion may have sold a lot more people on the idea of ending a human life, but it is what it is. It is not a right. It is a wrong.

Now the folks behind Dutch euthanasia law are tweaking their rules.

A new position paper just published by the Dutch Physicians Association (KNMG) says unbearable and lasting suffering should not be the only criteria physicians consider when a patient requests euthanasia.

The KNMG says the new guidelines will clarify the responsibilities, possibilities and limitations that physicians have within the regulations of the 2002 euthanasia law…

Until now, factors such as income or a patient’s social life played almost no role when physicians were considering a euthanasia request. However, the new guidelines will certainly change that.

Here’s the upshot:

After almost a year of discussions, the KNMG has published a position paper which says that social factors and diseases and ailments that are not terminal may also qualify as unbearable and lasting suffering under the Euthanasia Act.

In the words of a nurse/bioethics expert friend:

Loneliness will be added to the next strict condition to qualify for euthanasia.  This is a perfect example why we must do everything in our power to not allow euthanasia to become law.  Early in the 1990′s, Dr Karl Gunning, Dutch physician and dear friend once lamented:

“We have always predicted that once you start looking at killing as a means to solve problems then you’ll find more and more problems where killing can be the solution.” …

The passing of years have proved how prophetic Gunning’s fear was.

To repeat, we must do everything in our power to not allow euthanasia become law.

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Aug 22

Another ‘miracle recovery’

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Time is a gift. Especially in a hospital urgent care setting where final determinations are made in more haste these days.

So another story emerges…

Aaron Denham was lying motionless in his hospital bed after suffering a broken neck, smashed pelvis and punctured lung.

Doctors were within hours of turning off the 22-year-old carpenter’s life support machine.

But now, just a few months later, he is making a rapid recovery and can even walk unaided.

The first sign that talk of Aaron’s funeral was premature was when his hand flipped over at Southampton General Hospital. His mum, Deborah, ran from the intensive care unit in disbelief as the unexpected movement sparked dreams that he may survive the ordeal.

She had been preparing for the worst – even beginning the heart-breaking task of choosing music for the funeral with his sister Leanne.

What a dreadful scenario.

But Aaron, from Fair Oak, near Southampton, Hants, has done more than just survive. And despite initial fears he would be paralysed for life he is now on the road to recovery.

Doctors described Aaron’s turn-around as “miraculous”.

Note in the story that doctors seemed to give it just hours, determing that if there were no sign of recovery in that short time, they would have to switch off life support. Thankfully, in this case the tunraround happened within that time. The medical ethics clash is, in part, over the unaffordability of the gift of time in health care. I understand the arguments. I just rejoice that cases like this still prove human truths beyond the calculations of medical science.

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Aug 03

What’s wrong with HHS birth control mandates?

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Let’s count the ways…

So why is the federal deparment charged with the health and human services of its citizens suddenly requiring a massive implementation of an ideologically based scheme to cover birth control, sterilization and morning-after pills at great cost to insurers and taxpayers, and at a time when the federal government is in a budget crisis already?

To say this makes no sense is to state the obvious.

Go back for a moment to that AP report on the HHS announcement in the post below. The one that refers to this as a “broad expansion of coverage for women’s preventive care under President Barack Obama’s health care law.” Let’s parse this, according to the story as it originally appeared, because it’s gone through so many revisions and renditions, it no longer says the same thing at that same link.

Here’s what the AP said Monday:

Indeed, a government study last summer found that birth control use is virtually universal in the United States, according to a government study issued last summer. More than 90 million prescriptions for contraceptives were dispensed in 2009…Generic versions of the pill are available for as little as $9 a month. Still, about half of all pregnancies are unplanned. Many are among women using some form of contraception, and forgetting to take the pill is a major reason.

So. It’s not a matter of availability. And there’s no need for the government to provide this form of active population control under the guise of ‘women’s health preventive services’ or some variation therof. Why does the government see a need to provide what’s already available cheaply or freely, and allegedly being used by the vast majority of women? Which, important to note, is not preventing pregnancies in a large percentage of cases.

That point came up in a debate on radio this week between bioethics nurse Nancy Valko and a Planned Parenthood director. She went on to cite statistics from the Guttmacher Report online (a research arm of Planned Parenthood).

Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently.

Forty-six percent of women who have abortions had not used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant…according to this report, cost was not a factor in not using contraceptives.

Valko went on to say “fertility is not a disease and powerful hormones are not vitamins, and many women are not aware of the sometimes life-threatening complications. She cited two cases of healthy young women hospitalized in the past year for life-threatening blood clots in their lungs. “Doctors attributed this to the pill,” she said. She went on to note the irony that women are choosing hormone-free food but don’t think about taking powerful hormones to “treat” fertility.

Furthermore…

The Health and Human Services Department commissioned the report from the Institute (of Medicine), which advises the federal government and shut out pro-life groups in meetings leading up to the recommendations.

“These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, an abortion advocate, said…

Science? What science?

Here’s some science, which another nurse concerned with women’s issues made available, since most media won’t. And Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, has plenty of science Sebelius should be aware of.

This is not health care. It’s blind ideology.

And it’s a threat to healthcare providers with religious believes and moral convictions that oppose that ideology, convictions that have long been protected by law. This new mandate requires a new law, and two congressmen co-authored one that deserves attention. The Respect for Rights of Conscience Act started in the House and has now been introduced in the Senate. This is a good time to remind elected representatives what the people do not want, and cannot afford. In more ways than one.

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Jun 03

Dr. Death meets his

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….maker.

The family of Terri Schiavo released this statement.

“It was clear that this man had a dysfunctional obsession and infatuation with death and that his true involvement in these deaths was never properly reported,” stated Terri Schiavo’s Life and Hope Network’s Executive Director, Bobby Schindler.

In an October 2010 MSNBC interview with Jack Kevorkian, he was asked to weigh in on Terri Schiavo’s two-week court ordered dehydration death. Dr. Kervorkian stated that Terri would have qualified for his assisted suicide service. Kevorkian further explained, “[She] could qualify because the husband was next of kin, legally. And that’s all that counts because you can’t have interference by family members who might be antagonistic or hostile.”

“This statement only further exposes how the influences in society and the media used the torturous death of my sister, Terri Schiavo, to validate the ‘Right to Die’ mentality and Kevorkian’s lust for the death of others, which drove his agenda,” Schindler explained.

Contrary to this mentality, Terri Schiavo’s Life and Hope Network aggressively advocates for vulnerable persons, the disabled, and those who are dying.

“History will surely judge Kervokian as a very dark figure. We are very encouraged that today we see a greater awareness that every life deserves dignity and protection,” stated Suzanne Schindler Vitadamo, Terri Schiavo’s sister.

“While Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network denounces all of his work, we do recognize that every life is precious and therefore extend our prayers and condolences to the family of Jack Kevorkian,” added Vitadamo.

No matter what the circumstances, the ethic of life is consistent. It involves faith and the hope of reconciliation.

Catholics have responded to the June 3 death of assisted suicide activist Dr. Jack Kevorkian with prayers for him and his victims, affirming the Christian belief in the sanctity of life.

“Left out in much of the commentary on the death of Jack Kevorkian is the sobering and deadly legacy he leaves behind,” Ned McGrath, director of communications at the Archdiocese of Detroit, said in a June 3 statement.

McGrath added, “May God have mercy on his soul and on the scores of confused, conflicted, and, at times, clinically depressed victims he killed.”

When Justice Harry Blackmun passed away, a Catholic cardinal said ‘at least he now knows when life begins.’ The thought occurs that at least Kevorkian now knows when life is meant to end. And who decides.

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May 18

Deny conscience and redefine ethics

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And still call it health care?

Yes, in many places. Start with Sweden.

The Swedish parliament has overwhelmingly passed an order instructing Swedish politicians at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to fight against the rights of doctors to refuse to participate in abortions.

Read that again. The Swedish parliament overwhelmingly voted to deny doctors their fundamental conscience rights to practice moral medicine.

The Riksdag passed a resolution, by a vote of 271 to 20, to condemn an October 2010 PACE document supporting conscience rights for doctors.

This is surreal. But it’s really happening.

John Smeaton, head of Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, commented: “Sweden’s vote today shows the lengths to which the supporters of abortion are prepared to go to promote the killing of unborn children. There are no international conventions which recognise a right to abortion, whereas conscientious objection is a basic principle of international human rights law.”

This is a new world, and it’s not so brave. It’s seeming more like Wonderland all the time.

In Britain, there’s this:

A survey conducted recently of disabled people in Britain, commissioned by the disability group Scope, found that 70 percent are “concerned about pressure being placed on other disabled people to end their lives prematurely” “if there were a change in the law on assisted suicide.” More than a third were worried they would personally experience such pressure…

“Disabled people are already worried about people assuming their life isn’t worth living or seeing them as a burden, and are genuinely concerned that a change in the law could increase pressure on them to end their life.”

‘Life unworthy of life’ – or lebensunwerten Lebens - as Princeton Professor Robert George often speaks of, whether talking about abortion, euthanasia, Terri Schiavo and the cognitively impaired, or any group marginalized by a more powerful group.

And somehow, powerful groups are increasingly better-positioned to marginalize other human beings they consider unworthy of health care resources by a new calculus and tortured logic. Such as…ethics committees. Or some ethics committees in some places.

Piecing together the clinical picture of a complex patient is difficult enough. Add to the mix the patient’s value system, that of the family and those of various healthcare providers, and a case that might involve difficult decisions becomes even more daunting. That’s where an in-house ethics committee can step in.

That actually sets up a chilling premise.

Let’s jump to the section sub-headed ‘Common Conflicts.’

Patients and their healthcare providers frequently weigh the value of additional cancer-focused treatment versus comfort care only, as well as provision of other care such as dialysis, and artificial nutrition and hydration.

Stop right there. That’s a manufactured term, a misnomer. It was only in recent years that giving a patient basic food and water got labeled ‘artificial’ or ‘extraordinary’ care. For the very tendentious purpose of disqualifying it as basic and routine care.

Advance directives and appropriateness of a DNR order also fall under the goals-of-care umbrella, McCabe says.

As bioethics nurse Nancy Valko said on my radio show, advance directives were originally devised as a tool to facilitate the cause of euthanasia. Terri Schiavo was starved and dehydrated to death allegedly because she didn’t want any extraordinary measures to be applied to her care if ever she were to be in an impaired state. Which is far down the dark rabbit hole…but that’s another story for another time.

This is supposed to be about respecting choices, and advance directives are supposed to say what a patient doesn’t want done if they wind up impaired or in need of ‘extraordinary care’, and by redefining extraordinary care, pulling treatment can be ‘justified’ as patient choice.

However, choice falls apart when it doesn’t fit the scheme of withholding treatment or protecting life. Look at the end of this article:

Nurses also should understand their own value systems and set them aside when needed, because other considerations in an ethics case may trump personal beliefs.

Valko replies:

Conscience rights are not an optional ‘personal value system’ that can just be ‘set aside when needed.’ Conscience rights are a crucial protection against the ‘whatever is legal (or can be legalized) is ethical’ mentality that is overwhelming medical ethics.

Dr. George reminds anyone who will listen:

Since the life of every human being has inherent worth and dignity, there is no valid category of lebensunwerten Lebens. Any society that supposes that there is such a category has deeply morally compromised itself. As Leon Kass recently reminded us in a powerful address at the Holocaust Museum, it was supposedly enlightened and progressive German academics and medical people who put their nation on the road to shame more than a decade before the Nazis rose to power by promoting a doctrine of eugenics based precisely on the proposition that the lives of some human beings…are unworthy of life.

The new medical ethics are the old eugenics. And they’re not ethical, no matter what some committee decides.

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Apr 29

Stem cell spin

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Sometimes, the best scientific argument over a controversial bioethical issue is just dry and uninteresting to anyone but the science and medical comunity.

So Dr. Gerard Nadal does this thought experiment.

Imagine one is dining in a family restaurant and there are three different families, each with five children. Family A has children who are engaged in a food fight, screaming and jumping about.

Family B has children who are generally very well behaved but are given to bouts of restlessness and need to be spoken to by their parents.

Family C has children who are models of decorum, and who on their own have even taken it upon themselves to quietly clean up some of the mess left by other patrons.

That’s the stem cell war in a nutshell.

Clever. He explains how the analogy works in each case.

Now, back to our analogy. Imagine a reporter comes to the restaurant looking to do a story on children’s manners in restaurants but spends 90% of her time interviewing the father of Family A. He makes not one mention of his children’s recklessness and destructiveness, not one mention of the exemplary behavior of the children in Family C, but instead he holds forth on the dire future of the children in Family B, whose behavior is merely in need of periodic tweaking.

If that sounds unbalanced and bizarre, that’s the essential structure and trajectory of a recent Reuters article by Julie Steenhuysen, entitled “Imperfections mar hopes for reprogrammed stem cells.”

The core of the article is built around the father of Family A, Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

In other words, intellectally dishonest and obviously tendentious.

…Dr. Daley makes no mention at all of Family C, the adult stem cells, which have over one hundred therapeutic applications. In so doing, he fails to grasp the essential reason why induced pluripotent stem cells were sought after. It’s because biologically, embryonic stem cells are wild and untamable, while adult stem cells have gone through the process of cellular maturation naturally and are remarkably stable. They are also expensive to isolate, which is an economic limitation to their widespread use. Also, as embryonic stem cells come from another person, there is the issue of tissue rejection by the recipient.

And that’s happening, time and again. But we aren’t hearing that from the proponents of embryonic stem cells, because they’re too invested in the biotech industry that relies those unruly cells.

That famous line from Jurassic Park comes to mind again. Life finds a way.

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