Analysis Of Lisa Belkin's First Do No Harm

For anyone who has ever worked in healthcare, or simply for someone who has watched a popular hit television show such as Grey’s Anatomy, General Hospital, House or ER know that there can be times when a doctor or health care provider is placed in extremely difficult situations. Often times, those situations are something that we watch from the sidelines and hope for the best in the patient’s interest. However, what happens when you place yourself inside the doctors, nurses, or any other of the medical provider’s shoes? What if you were placed in charge of a patient who had an ethically challenging situation? What you would you do then? That is precisely what Lisa Belkin accomplishes in her book “First Do No Harm”. Belkin takes the reader on

Patrick is a 15 year-old-boy who is suffering from Hirschsprung’s disease, which is a disease of the digestive tract. Since he was a young boy, he has had multiple operations performed on him, each taking a small portion of his digestive tract. Currently in the story, there is little to no tract left and the people in the ethics committee are trying to make the dreadful decision if they should perform more operations on the Patrick, or simply encompass a DNR (do not resuscitate). For this specific meeting, Patrick’s mother, Oria, was supposed to show up and listen to what the doctors think about Patrick’s situation and help make a decision. Oria was late to the meeting, so the ethics committee started without her. When she finally did arrive, nearly an hour late, they explained to her that surgery is not the option anymore for Patrick, and that shocking him back to life will also be more harm than good for the young boy. It is during this time that Belkin tells us, “She hates meetings like these. She feels she is being judged, and she is right. She is confused by the medicalese and embarrassed at her shadowy presence in her own baby’s life “ (Belkin p. 45). Oria feels that the doctors, nurses, and others in the hospital who are taking care of Partick are judging her, especially in meetings like the one previously talked about. She feels as if the doctors are looking down on her because she works so much and does not spend sufficient

The one example of this that I found most relevant in the book is the situation of Armando. Armando was shot and the bullet lodged in the spinal canal. It caused enough damage to make him a paraplegic, but not enough to kill him. The ethics committee had decided that it was best to encompass a DNR because he had no health insurance, and his quality of life was not what it was before. When the doctors went to approve this with Armando, he denied the DNR and said that he wanted what ever was necessary to be done to him to save his life (Belkin p. 58-59). This made Cindy worried for the cost of keeping him alive was substantial. All the doctors and caretakers believed that he should be placed under DNR, however that was not what Armando wanted. The doctors believed that was the wrong decision. This correlates to what the quote was from the book on page 70; doctors can tend to be narrow-minded when it comes to the care of a patient. They believe that their course of action is the best and do not agree if the patient wants something different. This I have found is also true in my own personal experience with doctors. For example, when I was about 17 my wisdom teeth were growing in. I was in terrible pan from two of my wisdom teeth being impacted. My