Palliative Care Ethics: A good companion

• Book ID: 104624774
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 231 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0956-2737
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00056553

✦ Synopsis

Twenty-five years and counting into bioethics' rapt involvement with end-of-life treatment decisions, palliative care is beginning to be the rage. Perhaps it is not an idea whose time has finally come so much as a desperate reaction to the threat (for those who feel threatened) of legalized physician-assisted suicide. If the process of dying is not so terrible, then perhaps patients and the public will not be so enthusiastic about authorizing active euthanasia. Or, perhaps the interest in improved palliative care is part of a response to that unsuccessful bioethics intervention, the SUPPORT study. That study made it clear that providing information in various ways to various people did not change how end-of-life treatment was provided. The great disappointment of SUPPORT lies, perhaps, not so much in the unsuccessful (in terms of expected outcome) expenditure of $28 million as in the discovery that information doesn't work. This is indeed a hard lesson for the highlyeducated bioethics coterie that has staked a lot on informed consent.