Euthanasia and Futile Care :: Euthanasia Physician Assisted Suicide

Euthanasia and Futile Care   Imagine visit your 85-year-old mother in the hospital after she has a debilitating stroke. You hap out that, in order to survive, she requires a feeding tube and antibiotics to exhort an infection. She once told you that no matter what happened, she wants to live. simply the doctor abnegates advertise full of life treatment. When you ask why, you are told, in effect, The time has come for your mother to die. all we will provide is comfort care.   Sound far-fetched? Its non. Its already happening. Just as doctors once hooked people up to machines against their will, now many bioethicists commend that doctors be permitted to refuse life-sustaining treatment that a patient wants tho that they deem futile or inappropriate. Alarmingly, hospitals in California and throughout the soil take a shit begun to implement these futile-care policies that state, in effect We reserve the right to refuse service. Medical and bioethics journals for seve ral years kept up a rub-a-dub advocating the implementation of medical futility policies that hospitals -- for obvious reasons -- dont publicize. The mainstream news media have generally do by the threat. As a consequence, members of the public and their elected representatives remain in the blue(a) as futilitarians become empowered to hand down unilateral cobblers last sentences.   Indeed, futile-care policies are implemented so quietly that no one knows their extent. No one has made a systematic study of how many patients lives have been lost or whether futile-care decisions were reached according to hospital policies or the law. The idea stool futile care goes like this The patient wants life- sustaining treatment the doctor does not believe the quality of the patients life justifies the costs to the health institution or the physical and emotional burdens of care therefore, the doctor is entitled to refuse further treatment (other than comfort care) as futile or inappro priate. Treatments withheld under this insurance policy might include antibiotics to treat infection, medicines for fever reduction, tube feeding and hydration, kidney dialysis or ventilator support. Of course, physicians have never been -- nor should they be -- required to provide medical interventions that provide no medical benefit. For example, if a patient demands chemotherapy to treat an ulcer, the physician should refuse. Such a treatment would have no medical benefit. But this kind of physiological futility, as it is sometimes called, is not what modern futile-care conjecture is all about.