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April 9
Is a patient in PVS dying?
Wednesday, April 9, 2008, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Center for Health Policy & Ethics Conference Room
Discussants:
Making decisions about withdrawing life-sustaining technologies is always ethically and emotionally challenging. A lot depends on whether we are truly extending life or only the dying process. When patients are terminally ill, forgoing life-sustaining treatments appears more acceptable. The Vatican recently reiterated that artificial nutrition may be forgone when patients are dying but not if they are in a "stable condition." Even the law tends to grant terminally ill patients more rights than those who are not yet dying (e.g., certain advance directives only take effect when the patient is dying). Although it is not always easy to predict exactly how many days a person has left, we have always known what it means to be dying -- until medical technologies suddenly made it possible to keep people alive in a new state of being called "persistent vegetative state". Are these patients disabled but otherwise stable? Are they dying? If neither, then what?