Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Aaron Kheriaty, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor
UC, Irvine, Dept. of Psychiatry
Withdrawing
- Means to discontinue
treatment after it has
been started.
Withholding
- Means never starting
treatment.
Many people believe both are
ethically wrong
Patients have the legal right to
refuse treatment and food.
Certain and Necessary…
Useless?
Excessively burdensome?
Nutrition and Hydration:
Treatment or Care?
Treatment In most circumstances
Medical Act Food and water is
Medications natural means (care)
Surgery/Procedures
Aim is nourishment
Care
and sustenance
Natural means for
Aim is not alteration of
preserving life
Shelter, Warmth disease process
Turning to avoid bedsores
Cleaning wounds
Artificially Administered
Nutrition and Hydration
Ethically:considered care even when
delivered artificially (e.g., Dobhoff tube)
End is the same: sustenance/nourishment
Feeding tubes not high-tech
Small bore synthetic catheters
Simple to use, inexpensive, readily available
Not new
1793, physician John Hunter tube fed patients
who could not swallow
Refusal of Food and Water:
Ethical Considerations
Circumstances where food and water do not
attain proper end
No longer provide nourishment and sustenance
True of spoon-feeding or tube-feeding
“Artificial” distinction irrelevant to moral criteria
Useless or excessively burdensome
Example: Patient in process of dying
Organ systems failing
No longer absorb food or assimilate nutrition
ANH in Chronic Conditions
(e.g., PVS)
Presumption in favor of ANH not useless in PVS
ANH if patient not when achieves its end
actively dying Nourishment
Unless useless or Sustenance
burdensome ANH not excessively
Typically: ordinary care burdensome in PVS
On par with clean sheets, If pt experienced this as
warm room, bed care burden, then pt would not
Not on par with be diagnosed PVS
medications, ventilator,
dialysis, etc
I am not advocating…
…That extending life at all costs is always
imperative
…That human life must be preserved at whatever
cost to other human goods
…That a dying person should not be allowed to
die
…That we are obligated to use all extraordinary
means to keep dying person alive
I am advocating…
…That we should never aim at or directly intend
death of fellow human being
whether by action or omission
…That when we withhold or withdraw
extraordinary treatments
We aim to dispense with the treatment
Because the treatment is useless or burdensome
We do not aim to dispense with the patient’s life
Because we judge the life to be useless or burdensome
“Quality of Life” Considerations?
Objection: decision to end patient’s life
should be on the quality of her life
Appeals to our empathy for patient
Imagine ourselves living with her disability or in
her circumstances
This approach arises from legitimate fears
Fear that a person will be brutalized by
technology’s ability to sustain life
Fear of living a life of prolonged suffering
“Quality of Life”: Discriminatory
From an outside perspective, impossible to
judge the quality of life of another individual
Introduces a discriminatory principle into the practice
of medicine
“This patient’s quality of life is too poor, so we are not
going to treat her in the same way we would treat
another patient”
Introduces a eugenic principle into society
Historical evidence: devastating consequences
Quality of Life: Slippery Slope
No universal standard to judge quality of life
May start with altruistic motives
But judgments will eventually be determined by
Economic pressures (cannot be ignored)
Political pressures (potentially disordered political
system)
Arbiters of “quality of life”
Initially, patient, proxy, or physicians
Eventually, those with economic interests
Decision-making power open to abuses
Eugenics: Recent History
German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche (1920): paper
advocating euthanizing severely disabled
“Life Unworthy of Life” (Lebensunwertes Leben)
Phrase commonly cited in pre-Nazi Weimar Republic
Quality of life judgments dictated medical decisions
Physician’s testimony Nuremburg trials revealed
Principle eventually led to gross abuses and atrocities
Medical experimentation
Involuntary euthanasia of those deemed unfit
Both in Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany
Hippocratic Paradigm
“Into whatever houses I may enter, I will
come for the benefit of the sick…”
-Hippocratic Oath
Physicians: placed at service of the
individual sick person
Not an administrator of social resources or
political programs
Not an agent of state power/authority
Mistake of Nazi physicians
Physician Assisted Suicide,
Euthanasia
Intentionally causing death in order that
suffering may be eliminated
Sometimes proposed as solutions to burdens of
caregiving, suffering, or prolonged illness
Attempt at completely controlling death
Irony: attempting to master very event that finally
shows our lack of mastery
Self-contradictory: exercising autonomy in
order to eliminate autonomy
Ethics and Human Goods
Human life not merely instrumental good, but
inherent good
Not something we “have” or possess
It is what we are: living being
Our life is our person
Without life, we can possess no other goods
Precondition for all other human goods (grounding good)
Including goods of autonomy, independence, rationality, etc.
Human Life
Life is a good
Of the person
Not just for the person