Suffering & Suicide
Civilized societies don't remove people's access to medicine.
Losing your family doctor is a distressing experience. Especially if you’re elderly. And especially if that doctor has provided exceptional care.
In early 2022, on the heels of the Freedom Convoy, the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons restricted and then suspended the medical license of Dr Crystal Luchkiw. It did so well before it had bothered to establish that she had done anything wrong (see my earlier posts here and here).
Dr Luchkiw’s real crime, it seems, was being an independent thinker in the midst of COVID hysteria. Beginning at 6:20 minutes in this interview, she says she was aggressively pressured to change the death certificate of a patient who had faded into the sunset due to natural causes. That patient was invasively tested for COVID more than once during her final days, despite being in no state to consent to such testing. Two days prior, the patient had tested negative. But following her death, a positive test result was reported.
Dr Luchkiw says she received four telephone calls from hospital personnel urging her to alter the death certificate, to record COVID as a reason for that patient’s demise. Dr Luchkiw’s resistance to this groupthink may help explain why she appears to have been targeted by colleagues. It was, remember, a hospital administrator who reported her to the College.
According to her lawyer, Michael Alexander, many of Dr Luchkiw’s 1,600 patients were left “in a state of despair” after her license was abruptly suspended. He says a number of them, during their final days and hours, “died in awful circumstances because they lacked proper medication and Dr. Luchkiw's advice and support.”
Mr Alexander reports that another patient - a man who suffered from longstanding chronic pain - has since committed suicide:
The patient had seen many doctors over the years for pain control, but none of them had been successful in providing him with relief. Dr. Luchkiw, however, had found a way to treat his condition and had made life tolerable for him again.
Real people. Frail, elderly people. Losing access to medical care. Losing access to medicine. People without pain meds during their final hours.
How are any of these outcomes remotely civilized?
Thank you for getting this recorded Donna. If you know, maybe you could report when Dr Crystal Luchkiw goes before the CPSO tribunal- or did they somehow make this a criminal case going to court?
Anyway, I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to be there to support her.
That is just horrifying and, it just has to be said, immoral. What happened to this doctor and her patients is unconscionable. That the elderly person who was dying was tested invasively! That the lovely useful doctor doing a tremendous job was banned from working! Its unbelievable and it makes me angry.