After Gary Hobish collapsed while swing-dancing with friends in Golden Gate Park Sunday, a fellow dancer raced to the nearby de Young Museum in search of a defibrillator. Most people in the group knew Hobish, 70, had a heart condition. Seconds counted.
Inside the museum, Tim O’Brien found himself pleading with a staff member to let him use the life-saving device, or to accompany him back to where Hobish, a legend of the Bay Area music scene, lay unconscious. O’Brien offered the museum staffer his wallet and his watch as collateral.
The museum staffer checked with his boss, but the answer was firm: The de Young defibrillator could not leave the building.
O’Brien sprinted empty handed back to the group, where a doctor who had luckily been on the scene was administering CPR. Paramedics arrived a few minutes later, but by then nearly 10 minutes had gone by, O’Brien said.
But I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends
Was there an ethical obligation to share the defibrillator?
The answer is not obvious.
Next paragraph.
Officials and experts said there was apparently no legal obligation for the de Young to share the device.
They highlighted several complicating considerations: What if the staffer had lent it out, and minutes later someone at the museum collapsed and needed it, they asked. And why should he lend it quickly to a distressed stranger, not knowing if it was a thief trying to make off with a device that usually costs around $2,000?
What if two people at the museum collapse at the same time and require defibrillating? What if the thief actually needed that money to save 3 lives?
I know what motherfucker ghostwrote this drivel.
What if, while we were using the fire extinguisher, a different fire broke out? We’d better not use it at all.
“A person dying of heart failure is a person dying of heart failure, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a person dying of heart failure!”
What if the staffer had lent it out, and minutes later someone at the museum collapsed and needed it
Doing
to explain that the life of the old man dying outside is outweighed by the incredibly low risk to the life of a paying customer 
The trolley problem and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Love it when my mode of production acts as a fetter against attaining the post-conventional stage of moral development, a stage that adults are supposed to achieve.
What if no one involved ever consented in advance to being born and their lives are presumed to be unnecessary suffering anyway?
“I would rather someone die than risk breaking an arbitrary rule that carries no consequences” - America, 2023
This happens with healthcare policies too; you follow the policy to death vs break it to save a life.
I just watched that episode of Star Trek Voyager last night!
Which episode is this?
Definitely season 7, I think ep 4. The Doctor gets abducted and sent to work on a planet that has a “social value” calculator that determines what level treatment everyone gets
Oh hey that sounds like seeseepee china and nothing like the US.
That’s also the plot to Saw 6 lol
uhh, just take it dude.
Yep you gotta take it. “A man outside is dying. I am taking this. Call the cops if you want but you aren’t stopping me.”
There is a non-zero change the cops would have shown up and shot the Samaritan, the person with the heart attack and the defibrillator.
As well as any dogs in a ~100 meters radius
It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to even ask in the first place to be honest, just grab it.
They probably stopped the guy
The ones I’ve seen are locked. You’d have to hold them up for the code or key.
HAVE YOU PAID YOUR EXISTENCE FEE?
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Oh I thought that glass was breakable
This is what happens when society is centered around profit. The need of the institution to avoid liability, potential liability, is put higher than a person’s life. The staff member probably feared they’d lose their job or be retaliated against if they made a real decision. The boss made a choice to defend the institution at any cost.
What a fucked up system.
Life saving necessities are right there and they’re systematically denied to the ones who need them. We have enough housing to house the homeless. We have enough food to feed the hungry. We have enough medicine to heal the world. Yet doing all these things is a threat to profit, and so instead we feed bodies into the profit grinder, and the capitalists become rich and powerful on their blood.
I value efficiency so much and that makes me sad that the defibulator didnt get used. People made it for that purpose. Its an insult to any of the workers who loved their jobs.
also you know a man died
“We are deeply saddened to learn about the death of Gary Hobish in Golden Gate Park,” museum Director of Communications Helena Nordstrom said in emails to the Chronicle. “We don’t know exactly what happened and are trying to determine the facts.
“We don’t permit technical equipment beyond laptops to leave the building without permission. Then again, the event has prompted us to review the museums’ emergency response procedures for events that may occur outside the museum premises in the future so we can be as helpful as possible.”
- do not admit responsibility of any kind (“we are sorry” can be interpreted an admission of guilt).
- do not admit even a cursory understanding of the reported sequence of events that took place
- investigate internally
- imply internal examination of policies
CYA, the most american of moves.
any building open to the public and hosting an organization that has received > 1 cent of public assistance, tax credits, in-kind contributions or anything i’m not thinking of should be required to have these and make them available to anyone who asks. it should just be baked into the “cost of doing anything” like potable water, stable structures or other features of public safety. $2k ain’t shit. hell, we pay cops 3x that a month in the most podunk ass towns to take naps in their cars and shoot pets.
We are deeply saddened
We don’t permit technical equipment beyond laptops to leave the building without permission
This is Hague-worthy “suffering and death are okay if they follow the posted rules” shit.
Even if you accept that policy, couldn’t someone have given permission?
I don’t care if the defibrillator is a 100 year old antique worth a billion dollars on private property, or should still be accessible to anyone.
Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but WHO THE FUCK STEALS A DEFIBRILLATOR? IS THERE SOME SORT OF UNDERGROUND BLACK MARKET FOR DEFIBRILLATORS OF WHICH I AM UNAWARE?
We might need to start one to defend ourselves
Start up a street gang where we use defibrillators in a series of radical crimes
Can you imagine?
“Listen up mother fucker, give me your wallet or I’ll defibrillate you! Just come over here, open your shirt, let me apply these electrodes, wait for the thing to start… bypass the onboard software that says you’re not out of rhythm and thus it will not send a charge…”
I’m just picturing running around with one of those hospital crash carts, supercharging myself like Jason Statham in Crank
I’m imagining Robert Evens fighting the FDA with an arsenal of defibrillators from his compound, juiced up and raring to go
The same people who go to Rainbow Parties and participate in The Knockout Game.
Of course it’s San Francisco
Publish that boss’s name.
🙂
Frrrrrrr
i realize it is a feature of the communist’s worldsickness to hear this and think “this is because capitalism,” but i cannot think of another reason that multiple people could be told “there is an urgent medical emergency and we need the tiniest bit of help from you” and reply “that’s not my problem, plus i could get in trouble.”
Slavish, mewling deferance to law and authority runs deeper in the American than even the capitalist ideology.
Legalism and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human species.
No one has accused the Soviet Union of lacking legalism, and yet the thought of this happening there is impossible.
As someone who has been “in charge” on a site where there’s a defibrillator and had absolutely no training regarding it, I feel for the museum staff a bit. The one I’m familiar with was covered in warnings that amount to “absolutely do not open this box unless you are currently speaking with a medical professional who is telling you to do so” so I can’t say for sure what I’d do if a random person ran in and told me they needed to take it elsewhere. Sitting around now I can logically see, yeah, better to just let them take it and deal with the consequences than risk someone dying because I didn’t, but it’s not quite as easy when you’re suddenly thrust into that situation out of nowhere while you’re trying to get your work done and thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner
The museum staffer checked with his boss, but the answer was firm: The de Young defibrillator could not leave the building.
ethics without morals strikes again
Death to America
Trying explaining this to the bugboys that lurk the site.
If I could teach every spineless American liberal one thing with the snap of my finger it is that STEALING IS EASY AND MORALLY CORRECT IN MANY SITUATIONS.
Also: sometimes, don’t ask your boss. Just do it.
TIL duty to rescue laws don’t exist in most countries
What the fuck?
Maybe it’s because I work in healthcare, but the idea of just saying “no, you can’t have this life saving device” makes no sense. Dude was ready to hand over everything he had on him to just get the device. There was an incident at work where we noticed a man had fallen on the sidewalk just outside our unit, two of the nurses went to check on him while I stayed on the unit. They helped him get up and got him over to a bench. He did not want any help or an ambulance to be called but eventually we’d hear from the supervisor “technically it puts us at risk of liability because he’s not our patient.” Nobody was punished for it because nobody would really go and say “you see someone in distress, you do nothing.” They went and helped and I made sure that should something have happened on the unit, I was ready to immediately respond.
I would imagine that Good Samaritan laws would shield the nurses that went outside because they went and assisted to the best of their ability, but I have no idea how the organization would be held liable potentially.
Reminds me of the kids who were punished for saving their classmates from asthma attacks. One was punished for “sharing a controlled substance”, an inhaler, and the other was punished for carrying a kid to the nurse after the teacher told the class to stay in their seats while she waited for an email response from the nurse, even after the kid had collapsed on the floor from minutes of not being able to breathe. https://archive.is/xwnju
Dang didn’t even him em with the practicing medicine without a license, or a controlled substance distribution charge? Have we learned nothing from the war on drugs, come on guys this is day one Kamala Harris SF ADA boot camp material
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Every CPR class will teach you that if it’s available to grab a defibrillator and let it do its thing while you do CPR and if it wants to do a shock, that you let it. No harm in actually doing the shocks, like I was taught, you’re not going to make their day any worse by breaking ribs or shocking them. For a bystander that didn’t know this person’s medical history, they made the right decision to seek out a defibrillator. Would it have saved them, probably not. Does that change the fact that the Museum’s actions were terrible? No.
Acting like untrained civilians are working with a crash cart and not the briefcase is also silly. In any hospital they’ll start up with the automatic mode of any defibrillator before there’s a doctor present to give orders. In the end, the people involved did what they could and acting like they’re irresponsible and ignorant goes against what could potentially save lives in the larger picture. No doubt this guy was fucked, most people are when their heart stops working properly.
You should be ashamed of calling yourself a medical professional.
Besides your obvious lack of any empathy, you also seem to have very little knowledge of what first aid equipment does and why it’s a good thing to have them around.
These kind of defibrillators actually assist civilians in performing CPR and are almost fully automated. What sad excuse for a “professional” does not know this?
Glad people are correcting the record, there’s a possibility I could end up with that condition and even though I’ve taken basic CPR/First Aid for civilians their comment still made me go, Oh shit, really?
These kind of defibrillators actually assist civilians in performing CPR and are almost fully automated. What sad excuse for a “professional” does not know this?
Copypasta from Arthur show about smuglords lying on the internet intentionally here.
Hey [insert condescending name here] - I have Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. For your and anyone else’s information, the disease can cause sustained arrythmia like ventricular tachycardia/fibrillation, and yeah, a defibrillator (as the name would imply) is essential in such cases. If all you’re imagining are the structural changes of hearts with HCM you’re both ignorant and actively spreading disinformation. The man was out dancing, so presumably not in advanced heart failure. This sounds consistent with cases of sudden onset deadly arrythmia. If they can be terminated sooner rather than later then the heart can return to a healthy rhythm and avoid cardiac arrest entirely.
*Edited in compliance with mod request
A close family member of mine had HCM and was saved several times from defibrillators, internal and external.
The shocks suck real bad (if you’re conscious for them) but they sure beat the alternative. I’m glad your family came through it.
I’m replying to my removed comment asking mods to re permit it. I have edited it in accordance with their reason for removal.
I mean, isn’t that the point of an AED though
I wonder what the A in AED stands for.
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you’re gettin lit up, but before you quit this site for good i wanna say your username is funny
