I'm pretty sure we're in agreement here. I was responding to Yaelle, who was concerned about pain management for a dying child. There's no moral offense in giving as much morphine as needed to stop the pain, even if it predictably will interfere with respiration and shorten life.
If the doctors or the parents had the suppression of respiration and thus the suppression of the child's life as their as their direct intention --- then that is murder.
Those morphine pumps are NICE.
I was on one after my last c-section and it managed the pain better than anything else I had had previously.
The thing about pain, is that it takes a lot more to knock it down than to keep it down. The idea is to keep it under control than to let it get bad and have to do a lot more medication.
I had read somewhere that as you experience pain, the body secretes some substance that actually sensitizes the nerves to the pain, so that as you try to tough it out, the pain actually hurts worse because of biochemical reasons.
So pain killers work in two ways, one being numbing the pain, but the other is avoiding this process that over sensitizes the nerves to the actual amount of pain.