Originally posted by finnegan
.....Eventually, every society has a responsibility to debate openly and agree upon its attitudes to end of life care as to all health issues. People who become hysterical about such discussion need to grow up. Often dying is unpleasant and I think people are too insulated from the process to understand that it is often undignified and painful and distress ...[text shortened]... that has to be discussed and of course that is where it is so tiresome to run into the fanatics.
Too right, and that makes it seven now.
Australia has a system very close to the NHS. Recent governments have tried to push us towards a privatised American styled system, but conventional wisdom still has it that the best care is still largely found in our free public system
But I digress.
In the many years that I bludged around as an itinerant musician, I would on occasion work as an assistant in nursing. I did a 6month stint in a pallitive care ward once, and have seen many aspects of extended care for patients whose prognosis for any level of recovery is negligible. Eventually you are left with the overriding question. Whose morals do we serve and preserve. The squeamish awkwardness of those who attend the dying, or those caught in the throes of death themselves?
I think more often we protect the sensitivities of those who surround the bed, and not the occupant. While I am still uncomfortable about the notion of active euthanasia to bring about the death of any individual who is not terminal, as in the case of the babies mentioned in the Daily Mail article for whom fluids and food is withdrawn and who can take up to ten days to die, I think that is barbaric, on the other hand, given the drugs and stabilising medication and equipment we have these days, we can also keep an elderly person alive but in agony as the illness that is ravaging them is kept from doing its job by our medical prowess.
With an elderly person who will die as a result of their illness, the mechanism of dying is the increase of opiates and a withdrawal of foods and fluid. Our science and technology forces us to make choices that nature would have long before decided in favour of death.