This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Knowledge & Support Community

Our obligation on MS

The Ottawa Citizen August 12, 2010 Re: Ontario should follow Saskatchewan's lead on MS, Aug. 10.

On reading Bart Bakker's opinion article on the liberation procedure for multiple sclerosis, I am left wondering if Canadian medical communities have any obligations for trying this procedure because of membership in the World Medical Association (WMA) which has developed the Declaration of Helsinki as a statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects.

Section 35 reads: "In the treatment of a patient, where proven interventions do not exist or have been ineffective, the physician, after seeking expert advice, with informed consent from the patient or a legally authorized representative, may use an unproven intervention if in the physician's judgment it offers hope of saving life, re-establishing health or alleviating suffering. Where possible, this intervention should be made the object of research, designed to evaluate its safety and efficacy. In all cases, new information should be recorded and, where appropriate, made publicly available."

What good is membership in such international organizations if we don't bother following their guidance?


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/obligation ... z0wOjSljsd

and why is there such hostility toward ms? this is something i noticed 15 years ago...a coolness .

Wow. Nice finding. And it applies also in other countries.
Thanks.

I think the key words there are "may use" and "should be". These are weasel words. In the Internet Engineering Task Force's series of thousands of documents called RFCs for Requests For Comments, there are explanations and the mandate that all these documents capitalize to disambiguate the words MAY MUST, SHALL and SHOUD. The only ones that are important are MUST and SHALL, MAY and SHOULD only define good or recommended practice. If anybody fails too do a thing, and there is no law saying MUST or SHALL, or they do a thing and there is a no law saying MUST NOT or SHALL NOT, well I guess they are OK. This is a good guideline, and obviously one Ontario does not care for.

Incidentally they are a Liberal government, and the Federal Liberals have a few hard advocates for the Liberation procedure in Dr. Kirsty Duncan, the Liberal health critic Dr. Carol Hughes, and M.P. Peter Julian from B.C.

The Liberal Leader, though wishy-washy on most things, I believe supports us. Why the Provincial Liberal party is so different can only be because of interest groups and lobbyists. I don't think they have quite the constraints on their behaviour that Federal Liberals do.

But they are all politicians, and I think if the email, letter, and word-of-mouth campaign that saved Barb Farrel were done again, to save the hundreds at death's door in Canada (not the thousands in the US, one step at a time), it might succeed.
_________________
CCSVI kills. Let doctors save lives.