{"id":949,"date":"2010-08-25T11:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T11:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2010\/08\/a-spine-for-a-spine.html"},"modified":"2010-08-25T11:15:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-25T11:15:00","slug":"a_spine_for_a_spine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2010\/08\/a_spine_for_a_spine.html","title":{"rendered":"A spine for a spine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A judge in Saudi Arabia reportedly<\/a> approached several hospitals to find a doctor willing to surgically injure a man’s spinal cord in order to punish him for paralyzing another man.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, 22-year-old Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi was paralyzed and lost a foot after being attacked with a cleaver. His assailant has spent seven months in prison for the crime. Now al-Mutairi is invoking the Sharia principle of qias<\/em>, or equivalence, which means a perpetrator must suffer the same wounds inflicted on the victim&mdash the proverbial “eye for an eye”.<\/p>\n

Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the punishment would qualify as torture.<\/p>\n

“We have a firm belief that this part of physicians should not participate in any inhumane treatment, even as a part of legal punishment in their country,” said Otmar Kloiber<\/a>, secretary general of the World Medical Association, an international physicians’ organization which supports the right of Saudi doctors to refuse to perform the operation.<\/p>\n

Saudi officials have swiftly entered damage control mode, reportedly urging al-Mutairi to accept blood money in lieu of the operation.<\/p>\n

In the US, where capital punishment is still legal, doctors can be caught in a conflict between their pledge to “do no harm” and the American justice system. While the American Medical Association’s guidelines<\/a> state that a physician “should not” participate in the administration of a lethal injection, thus far not a single doctor<\/a> has been disciplined by a US medical board for doing so. But in May of this year, the American Board of Anesthesiology announced that it would revoke<\/a> the certification of any member of its organization that participated in lethal injection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A judge in Saudi Arabia reportedly approached several hospitals to find a doctor willing to surgically injure a man\u2019s spinal cord in order to punish him for paralyzing another man.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odds-and-ends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}