Sir, - It was impossible not to weep at least silently at the stories told by Fionnuala O Reilly and Charlotte Yeats on Morning Ireland and on the Late Late Show last week. They both spoke of the grief caused to them by the treatment of their dead babies' organs in Our Lady's Hospital, Crumlin. Fionnuala said her baby's heart and lungs have been sitting on a shelf for five years. Any person of normal feeling knows this is grievously wrong.
Since 1996 we have had the privilege of listening to at least 300 people injured in various ways by the medical profession. You can almost touch and taste their grief it is so profound. It is largely unheard also probably because most of us have a need to believe in our own immortality and in the magic healing skills of a profession full of superheroes. We do a disservice to injured people, to the medical profession and to society at large with this myth.
Many of the people we have the honour to talk to are wounded in their souls. Some people come to terms with what has happened. Others grieve permanently because of the seriousness of the insult that has been perpetrated on their bodies and their souls as a result of bad medicine. Some suffer from chronic depression for which they have been hospitalised. Still others have cut themselves or attempted suicide in the manner we now know is associated with prolonged sexual and/or physical abuse. Some are strong enough to take legal action, others are not. At any rate the appropriate moral response to many of the stories we hear is not anger but outrage.
Listening to people as they bear witness to the hurt they suffered will ultimately improve the medical treatment we all receive, if we believe them and act on their experiences. Most injured people ask what manner of human being treats people in a way that causes such deep wounds, wounds that may never completely heal. What manner of doctor perpetrates what amounts to medical abuse? How can they stop others suffering as they have?
We must change a culture that sometimes treats sick people and their relatives very cruelly indeed. No civilised society can afford even a small number of desensitised doctors. We owe it to society at large and to the many humane doctors to put an end to it because stories of good medicine gently practised do not wipe out the bad, or vice versa, like some kind of balance sheet. - Yours, etc.,
Sheila O Connor, Dr Tony O Sullivan, Patient Focus, Templeogue, Dublin 16.