Kids, if you want an interesting career that will make you the life of any dinner party, get an advanced degree in bioethics. Everyone will want your opinion on news stories like the one about a Canadian physician who is refusing to treat an 84-year-old man in the intensive care unit. The physician is defying a court order to continue treating the man, claiming that any intervention would constitute a breach of his oath to do no harm.
The tension between courts and physicians in end-of-life decisions is something I find interesting. We rely on physicians’ expertise and judgment when deciding on courses of treatment. But we give a court of law the ability to substitute its judgment when the physician makes a decision contrary to the family’s wishes, especially when that decision might lead to the patient’s death. We’re comfortable when physicians take measures to prolong life, but everyone lawyers up when the physician and family disagree about the futility of treatment. It begs the question of how much deference we are really willing to give physicians.
I’ve read he story- my spontaneous reaction was: poor old patient!! The doctors should sedate him, and let him sleep softly until his death.
To die, to sleep, no more, perhaps to dream,
and by that sleep to say: we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to …it s a consolation devoutly to be wished!
Shakespeare said, of course.