Medical staff of a hospital have abandoned an unconscious man brought into their hospital after they found a tattoo on his chest which said “Do Not Resuscitate”.

The man’s ‘do not resuscitate’ tattoo forced Miami emergency doctors to confront the ethical conflict between a patient’s wishes and a doctor’s duty, reports Daily Mail.

The 70-year-old man was unconscious and presumably drunk, given his elevated blood-alcohol level, when paramedics brought him to the emergency room.

His pulse slowed to a worrying rate, and the doctors decided to try to save him any way, but were getting no responses, according to a case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

After consulting with ethicists, the doctors decided to respect the man’s tattoo, but the quandary made them aware of the need for an updated system of tracking patients’ end of life wishes.

Paramedics brought the senior to the University of Miami hospital emergency room after finding him on the street.

The man had alcohol in his system and couldn’t be roused, but none of that was terribly unusual.

‘Unfortunately, we get a lot of that kind of patient at my hospital,’ says Dr Greg Holt, one of the doctors who treated the man.

The man’s tattoo was, however, unique enough to draw Dr Holt, who was the attending physician that night, and his entire team of eight down to the emergency to see what the fuss was all about.

The man had a signed ‘do not resuscitate’ on his chest, with a line under the ‘not’ for emphasis.
(Source: http://massmediang.com/inexplicable-hospital-staff-abandon-unconscious-man-who-had-do-not-resuscitate-tattoo-across-his-chest/)

Nwaamaikpe come and see

Suicide by tattoo.

They did the right thing. If they resuscitated him, dude could sue the hell out of the attending doctor and the hospital