Dear Editor,

Bioethics is a monster, gestated in big government and the insurance industry.

There were no bioethics courses in my medical school...only a Roman Catholic medical ethics course and exhortations about the tradition of Hippocrates. That was all any physician needed. That is all any physician needs now.

Futility, a major tenet of bioethics, "is a value judgment, not a medical determination" and "determinations about futility involve paternalism" in the most perverse and futile way. Futility decisions are based on prejudice and bias against disabled people and minorities. In addition, "futile care theory gives some of medicine's most important health care decisions to strangers." Futilitarians are quoted as calling the murderous Kevorkian approach to be "utopian utilitarianism" (I think these bioethicists are bragging, not complaining). Futility theory is a manipulation accelerating death spuriously meeting the desperate bewilderment of those who have run out of things to do. Interestingly, while bioethicists talk about "futility in medicine," they manage to overlook the greatest futility in all medicine: health care administration, health care insurance, and bioethics, all three of which should be rationed and then the plug pulled.

Ninety-nine percent of medical cases need no bioethics. Only in cases where death is desired does bioethics achieve any sort of significance. The bioethical phenomenon is a tireless self-promotion and self-protection racket filled with self-righteous convenient white lies and clever words. Bioethics is a house of cards and a word salad. It is an intellectual guillotine for those who want others dead or not cared for. Some of it is harmless but not so in the tough cases when all erring is on the side of death, big government and insurance profit. Bioethics is out to defeat the individual doctor/patient relationship which needs no bioethics if the tradition of Hippocrates is embraced.

The evil coming from the bioethics movement needs to be understood for what it is and loudly identified to the public as you did in the previous special issue of the Medical Sentinel, Summer 2002, "Individual-based Medical Ethics vs. Population-based Bioethics." All those supporting bioethics should be removed from the field of medicine. Bioethicists are morticians, not clinicians. Take no chances. More than cursory contact with bioethicists or megabureaucracy sychophants is malpractice and against patient care.

Samuel A. Nigro, MD
Cleveland Heights, OH

Correspondence originally published in the Medical Sentinel 2002;7(3):69-70. Copyright©2002 Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).