Baby Charlie Gard died

By Baba Grumpy

And he sadly died just short of his 1st birthday.

I can imagine the pain his parents must have been going through while they had to go from one court to another and to try and get a concession that their child spend his last day at home.

You start to imagine how callous of the health professionals behind the court cases. They are always right and every one else is wrong. Amazing.

From a common sense perspective, this can’t be right. Not one person has the full knowledge about ANY medical condition. There is abundant evidence of many people who have been told they will never get cured or die who eventually recover amazingly. There are many instances where medical knowledge has fallen short. So why did the courts accept the stance of Great Ormond Street Hospital? They are not infallible. I will never understand the decisions of the court on Charlie’s treatment.

It wasn’t as if, Charlie’s parents wanted to take him to an alternative medicine practitioner. They wanted to take him for experimental medical treatment that might or might not work. They wanted him to have a shot at life. The hospital arguing that it will have no effect or will bring him more pain is extremely silly. How many doctors have you met that have told you definitively that ANY TRETMENT will work in a particular way? NONE in my experience.

They are the masters of ’emming’ and ‘awwing’, couching their words in deceptive ‘get out of jail if something goes wrong’ phrases, yet they were so certain about the outcome of Charlie’s treatment. Smells like rotten fish to me.

As adults, we all go through a certain level of pain to get well or to get the treatment that will help us recuperate. People undertake operations, going under the knife for elective surgery so they can get better but Great Ormond Street Hospital denied Charlie the opportunity to undertake a treatment that might or might not make him better. This is CRUEL.

The medical profession in the UK, the government, the courts are all against assisted dying. They will forcibly keep you alive and will prosecute your family for helping you die if you felt your quality of life was poor but the same system refused to keep Charlie alive. They were determined to kill him and the courts were willing accomplices to his death.

Charlie didn’t need the taxpayer’s money for his pioneering / experimental treatment. He didn’t need to go to Great Ormond Street from the start but that didn’t prevent the system from flexing its muscles over the life of poor little Charlie. The same medical system that postpones life-threatening surgery because of lack of funds thinks nothing of installing itself as the protector of Charlie & everybody’s quality of life. Sadly they don’t care about anybody, only thing they care about is for everybody to know that their decision is final.

I am 100% certain that case law in the UK has been established that adults can refuse any type of treatment if they so wish as long as they understand the implications of their decision and they have not been coerced into making that decision. But here is a little boy who was not allowed to reject the treatment course prescribed by Great Ormond Street Hospital. He was also not allowed to take up a treatment his loving parents and other medical professionals thought might help him. BIG SHAME.

I definitely remember Baby Ashya King’s case. You can read the case here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case

This is the medical professionals at their very worst. You disagree with them and you have committed the unforgiveable sin. They were going to forcefully repatriate Ashya to the UK until the general public stepped in. They were going to forcefully administer a treatment the parents had concerns over. They refused the proposed alternative treatment and derided that alternative. Over a year after Baby Ashya’s treatment, the hospital authorities were still trying to justify their decision that the treatment wasn’t right blah blah blah.

Much to the disgust of the medical profession, Baby Ashya is fine now and today, the NHS will gladly pay for proton beam therapy. Something it was insisting as recently as 2 years ago was of no value. THAT’S THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR YOU.

More parents in Charlie Gard’s case should do like Ashya King’s parents.

Baba Grumpy works in financial services in the United Kingdom. He blogs mostly about football at http://babagrumpy.blogspot.co.uk. His Twitter handle is @BabaGrumpy