Canadian doctors respond to idiotic claim.

A number of scurrilous schlock news outlet and tabloids are slagging our medical services and repeating one US doctor's speculative claim that Canada's health care system failed Natasha Richardson.

Meanwhile Canadian physicians kept their calm and responded rationally to the ill-founded opinion piece.

The implication “is totally unjustified,” said Paul Saba, an emergency room doctor at Lachine Hospital and co-president of the Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice. He flatly rejected the notion that a lack of funding for overall public health care contributes to fatal head injuries like the one that claimed the life of Richardson ... Saba stressed he was not commenting specifically about Richardson, but “any patient’s refusal of treatment is crucial” to the outcome. ...

Paul Brunet, president of the Council for the protection of patients, said ... “And with all due to respect to the Americans, we don’t need any lessons from them about health care,” Brunet added. Canada doesn’t “have 50 million people without health care like they do.”

Canada's healthcare system killed Richardson, claims US physician.

The New York Post published an obnoxious opinion piece from a physician who claims that Canada's health care system is to blame for Natasha Richardson's death. The serious (and obvious) evidence-supported argument that he should have used - that in the US, rich and famous people have faster and better access to medical interventions - is conspicuously absent from his screed.

On a more positive note, brebis noire and I discussed in the comments after this blogpost whether Richardson might have donated her organs to patients waiting for transplants. It appears that this may be the case.

... her family allowed doctors to keep her organs for those whose lives they could save. The English actress who died after a skiing accident, was buried this week. A friend of her husband, Liam Neeson, told People magazine that she had supported organ donation.

"She spent so much time fighting the stigma of AIDS; someone like that would naturally donate her organs... by donating her organs something good could come out of [the tragedy]," said the un-named friend.

An autopsy performed in New York, where Richardson died at the Lenox Hill Hospital, showed a blow to her head had caused fatal bleeding between her brain and skull, known as an epidural haematoma. Experts said the way she had died would have left her organs viable for donation.

Paparazzi will likely be dumpster-diving behind Lenox Hill Hospital in the hopes of finding confidential documents that will help them locate the beneficiaries of Richardson's final act of generosity.

Natasha Richardson, 1963 - 2009

Sunday May 10th will be a deeply sad Mother's day in the Neeson /Richardson /Redgrave family this year. The next day would have been her 46th birthday.

Those who have lost a sister, a daughter, a spouse, a mother to a sudden, stupid and incomprehensible accident have an understanding of their profound grief.

My impression of Natasha Richardson was based on performances that she perfected and that I watched, reviews or short news items that I read. For example, this piece about her role in The Handmaid's Tale.

Natasha Richardson was never afraid to speak her mind.

And it was in defence of a revered Canadian writer that she first showed her capacity for bluntness. ... Natasha Richardson could have been more circumspect about The Handmaid's Tale, given the fact that it represented a huge career opportunity, but that wasn't in her nature. ... She saw both novel and film as an important cautionary tale. She strode unrepentantly into a minefield when she cited her reasons for applauding a screen version - the rise of fundamentalism in the American South, the constant threats of censorship in so-called democratic countries, the continuing abortion debate, the lesson of Nazi Germany. And she was proud of the fact that this was a project proceeding from a firm feminist perspective.

But she also made it clear that her loyalty was to Canada's Margaret Atwood, rather than the movie, and she took delight in chastising the big Hollywood studios which had refused to finance a feminist-oriented story that was clearly set in a United States taken over by right-wing fundamentalist fanatics - a country where the few remaining fertile women were required to act as surrogate mothers or ``handmaids'' to the ruling male elite.

It was her concern for the integrity of Atwood's novel which led to her bold criticism of Pinter's screenplay. ... Richardson recognized early on the difficulties in making a film out of a book which was ``so much a one-woman interior monologue'' and with the challenge of playing a woman unable to convey her feelings to the world about her, but who must make them evident to the audience watching the movie. She thought the passages of voice-over narration in the original screenplay would solve the problem, but then Pinter changed his mind and Richardson felt she had been cast adrift. ...

"Harold Pinter has something specific against voice-overs,'' she said angrily 19 years ago. "Speaking as a member of an audience, I've seen voice- over and narration work very well in films a number of times, and I think it would have been helpful had it been there for The Handmaid's Tale. After all its HER story.''

In the end director Volker Schlondorff sided with Richardson. ... "As far as I was concerned, at the risk of offending Harold, the book was my bible.''

Natasha Richardson's mother Vanessa Redgrave has supported the Palestinian people's human rights for decades now. Perhaps I shouldn't assume that religious fundamentalists and anti-feminist, right-wing neo-cons will respond to news of Richardson's death and her family's grief with the same vile and gloating petulance that they displayed towards the recent commemoration of Rachel Corrie's death. Let's hope that most of them are decent and compassionate people.