Thread by reaganaut1.
While the national health coverage debate has been roiled by questions of whether the government should be paying for end-of-life counseling, physicians [...], in consultations with patients or their families, are routinely making tough decisions about the best way to die.
Among those choices is terminal sedation, a treatment that is already widely used, even as it vexes families and a profession whose paramount rule is to do no harm.
Doctors who perform it say it is based on carefully thought-out ethical principles in which the goal is never to end someone’s life, but only to make the patient more comfortable.
But the possibility that the process might speed death has some experts contending that the practice is, in the words of one much-debated paper, a form of “slow euthanasia,” and that doctors who say otherwise are fooling themselves and their patients.
There is little information about how many patients are terminally sedated, and under what circumstances — estimates have ranged from 2 percent of terminal patients to more than 50 percent. (Doctors are often reluctant to discuss particular cases out of fear that their intentions will be misunderstood.)
While there are universally accepted protocols for treating conditions like flu and diabetes, this is not as true for the management of people’s last weeks, days and hours. Indeed, a review of a decade of medical literature on terminal sedation and interviews with palliative care doctors suggest that there is less than unanimity on which drugs are appropriate to use or even on the precise definition of terminal sedation.
Discussions between doctors and dying patients’ families can be spare, even cryptic. In half a dozen end-of-life consultations attended by a reporter over the last year, even the most forthright doctors and nurses [only hinted at the drugs' effects]...
Terminal sedation IS NOT a treatment. It’s murder by poison.
Colorado has our own “bioethicist” death-peddler who has pushed
terminal sedation for years!
http://www.coloradobioethics.org/advisory_board_fredabrams.html
Thanks for the ping!