Yours: Well, it hasn't been from concerns about pain. The theory, in case you missed it, is that with a little transitory help they can be restored to self-sufficiency (it doesn't always work out that way). We are trying to prevent normal healthy people from dying from lack of food. Alzheimers patients are, well, a little different than that. Do you think that Alheimers results from failure of a wheat crop? Are factual distinctions lost on you?
I guess you didn't understand what the /sarc tag (from my original post) meant. I was referring to more than just Alzheimers' patients, but I suppose you weren't. Sorry that I threw in the whole 'useless eater' thing when you maybe weren't referring to them all. Didn't mean to mislead you.
The talking heads keep reminding us of how "painless" it is to be starved and dehydrated, and I was just using the analogy about famine to show that it really isn't. I wasn't speaking to only the Alzheimer's situation.
Unfortunately, your analogy doesn't prove that death by dehydration isn't painless. Uniform expert testimony proves that it is. Here is the testimony of three experts quoted by Knight-Ridder Newspapers:
"'Nature has given us a wonderfully peaceful way to exit this life,' said Ira Byock, director of palliative medicine at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. 'The dominant way that mammals die is that, at some point, they lose interest or the ability to eat or drink. The physiology and experience of people who are unable or refuse to eat or drink after progressive or advanced illness is one that is very gentle and very comfortable.' John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary, allergy and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, made a similar point, saying, 'This is the way many, many people died over all of the millenniums until medicine got so actively engaged in the process.' Paul Marik, director of the division of pulmonary and critical care at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said Schiavo may react reflexively to pain, but only the most primitive part of her brain, the brain stem, is working. 'Pain is a conscious interpretation of what's happening,' he said. 'If you can't interact with the environment, if you're not awake and you're not conscious, you can't perceive pain.'" Schiavo will die of dehydration, not starvation, the doctors said. It will cause her kidneys to fail. Toxins will build up in her blood, eventually causing her heart to stop beating. Dehydrated patients gradually weaken, drift into a coma, and appear to die painlessly, Marik said. ``It's a very painless and very compassionate way of dying.''
Your analogy suffers several shortcomings, not the least of which is that famine sufferers in third world countries are not PVS patients with only functioning brain stems.