In this, Part 3 of my review of Professor Thaddeus Pope’s paper about the legal issues surrounding unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT), I focus on problems with advance directives (ADs).
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In Part 1, I provided an actual case of unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT), listed Professor Pope’s “Twelve Leading Causes of Unwanted Life-Sustaining Treatment,” gave the causes of action that may be available for unwanted LSMT, and briefly discussed Physician’s Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) and other similar documents used in various states. Here, in Part 2, I delve further into Professor Pope’s research on unwanted LSMT.
An important right in managing end-of-life medical treatment is the right to make our own decisions, either directly or through a surrogate, about when to refuse unwanted treatments. No one has done more to call attention to the right to reject unwanted medical treatment than Thaddeus Pope, who tracks litigation against medical providers who treat patients in ways the patients do not want to be treated, in direct violation of their expressed written choices, their verbally-expressed decisions, or the decisions of their medical agents.
Thanks to everyone who made suggestions to deal with Jane’s presumptive problems (see previous post). If Jane had an independent social worker–one not in her healthcare system–that person might respond to Jane’s difficulties with something like the following:
Many people with debilitating and irreversible health conditions do not have supportive family and friends. They include include people with metastatic cancer, irreversible neurological conditions, and multiple medical problems that have taken away any enjoyment and quality of life as determined by them. They no longer want to continue living because they know that their condition will only worsen, and for them it is already beyond bad. There is no realistic hope that their lives will improve. Most of the time, family members and friends are able to see the suffering in their loved one’s life and understand a desire to end the suffering. But this is not always the case, as illustrated in this post.
If we use “existential suffering” as a stand-in for all of the related terms we use, it will help us discuss what we may mean by them. Certainly, distress, dread, angst, anxiety, anguish, or crisis all suggest suffering at least in a mental or psychological sense, a kind of suffering that all people encounter at one point or another in their lives, or even daily. Some existential suffering can be mitigated through changes in circumstances or with the help of others, but when one is dying, whether slowly or rapidly, one may wish to forego the suffering whether or not there may be temporary relief for it.
There is no medical reason why a person who hastens their death because of suffering or unacceptable quality of life should be precluded from being an organ or tissue donor. What is important is the medical history of the prospective donor, the location at time of death, and the timely discovery of the body after a non-hospital death, which affects tissue donation.
Lamar Hankins discusses how the disabled are devalued and prevented from having the same rights non-disabled people have. What a person considers a fulfilling life should be decided by each person, not by the opinion of any other person, including by someone who is disabled.
Lamar Hankins shares his notes taken from a lecture by Professor Thaddeus Pope, who spoke on the topic “Avoiding Advanced Dementia with a VSED Directive” for the Hemlock Society of San Diego.
In this third part of a series analyzing the arguments against medical-assistance-in-dying (MAID) by opponents of physician-assistance in hastening a person’s death in the face of a terminal illness, Lamar Hankins looks at a major reference for most MAID opposition articles – a 2008 Michigan Law Review article, “Physician-Assisted Suicide in Oregon: A Medical Perspective,” by psychiatrist Herbert Hendin and neurologist Kathleen Foley. Both oppose what they term “assisted suicide.”
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