By Hana Abbasian In modern healthcare, death is often treated as a medical event to manage, a problem to solve, or a process to streamline. We focus on measurable outcomes: pain scores, vital signs, sedation levels. While these metrics are important, they can obscure a deeper truth: dying is a human and often spiritual experience. […]
Category: death and/or dying
Do Brain Death guidelines conflict with reproductive autonomy?
By L. Syd M Johnson When Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria (BD/DNC) occurs during pregnancy, complex questions emerge concerning the moral and legal status of the brain dead pregnant person, the continuation of life-sustaining treatment to save a fetus, the exploitation of pregnant bodies, and the potential conflicts between the prior, autonomous wishes of pregnant […]
Hi, I’m a hospice doctor. Here’s your bill.
By Jennifer Eitingon, MD, with Margaret P Battin, PhD When asked about the often serious ethical quandaries hospice providers are often faced when providing care for a patient nearing death, the one thing that plagues most is not the medical aspect of how to manage suffering, nor the existential questions of how we, as embodied […]
The Assisted Dying Debate and the Questions We Aren’t Asking
By Christina Lamb and Daniel Wainstock Judith Butler once wrote, “Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.” As the Assisted Dying (AD) debate progresses following its […]
Thoraco-Abdominal Normothermic Regional Perfusion: Can the dead “beheaded” donor be killed?
By Christos Lazaridis. Thoraco-abdominal normothermic regional perfusion (TA-NRP) is a relatively novel technique for donation after the circulatory determination of death (DCDD). In short, after declaration of death by circulatory criteria (as in conventional DCDD), the circulation to the brain is surgically excluded followed by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) and perfusion of the thoracoabdominal organs. […]
Hidden harms and the death of Alexei Navalny
By Johnna Wellesley. “Life makes no sense if you have to tolerate endless lies.” (Navalny) The sudden death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on 16 February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony was felt around the world. Responding to the announcement from the Federal Penitentiary Service, his wife, Yulia, addressed the Munich Security […]
Survival, dying well and intensive care
By Thomas Donaldson. Intensive care (ICU) medicine is amazing. When a disease causes a patient to become critically ill because their lungs, kidneys or cardiovascular system have started to fail, ICU treatments can take over the job of these organ systems to provide extra time for them to recover. Intensive care treatment has prevented the […]
Additional factors tending against the prosecution of suspects in cases of ‘mercy killings’ ought to concern all sides of the debate
By Rebecca Limb. Assisted dying is unlawful in England and Wales. To end or assist in the ending of another’s life out of compassion for and/or at the direction of the victim is not a defence to murder. A suspect will be prosecuted where there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest […]
Consensual lethal organ harvesting: dissecting ‘double effect donation’
By Anthony McCarthy and Helen Watt. Imagine I am an altruistic person in good health who is struck by how many people my organs (heart, lungs etc) could save if I became a live donor. Perhaps my life is not going well, and I want to make a greater contribution to society than I have […]
Are terminally ill patients disabled?
By Philip Reed. Asked to name groups of individuals who commonly face discrimination, most of us would probably come up with roughly the same list: racial minorities, people with disabilities, certain religious groups, women, and LGBTQ persons. If we have extra time to think, we might also mention heightism, sizeism, and lookism as lesser-known or […]