By Ilaria Bertini. In recent months the story of Indi Gregory has been brought to light by the media as another dreadful story of life and death involving a critically ill 8-month-old baby with no prospect of recovery. When Indi was born, she was admitted as a PICU patient at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham […]
Category: Palliative care
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 […]
Euthanasia, palliative opioid use and palliative sedation: A rejoinder
By Thomas David Riisfeldt. One of my recent essays has generated a considerable amount of critique which I was fortunate to be able to explore in my essay ‘A response to critics: Weakening the ethical distinction between euthanasia, palliative opioid use and palliative sedation’. I will briefly comment on some of these points here. I […]
How should crisis sedation be presented to dying patients at risk of a catastrophic event?
By Dr Nathan Emmerich and Prof Bert Gordijn When we consider the end of our life and the actual circumstances of our death the vast majority of us would prefer to go peacefully, perhaps dying of simple old age at the end of a life well lived. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Whilst the […]
Advance directives, personal identity, and the body: what follows if dementia produces a different individual?
By Govind Persad. I recently published “Authority Without Identity: Defending Advance Directives via Posthumous Rights Over One’s Body” in JME. In the paper, I argue that even if the psychological changes caused by dementia mean that the individual who existed before dementia is a different individual from the individual who exists afterward, a pre-dementia advance […]
Not long for this world: The timing of requests for a medically hastened death in the context of end of life care
By Lori Seller and Veronique Fraser As ethicists working in university health centers, many of our consultations revolve around decision making at the end of life. We know from academic literature, as well as from experience, that end of life discussions tend to come late in the illness trajectory and that the quality of these discussions […]