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Forgoing Medical Treatment |
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 Thinking
about life-sustaining treatments
As with all medical treatments, the benefits and burdens should be
balanced against each other when deciding whether or not to continue
tube feedings, IVs, or ventilator breathing. The burdens imposed by
these artificial treatments should not be ignored just because the
treatments are keeping someone alive.
Tube feedings, IVs, and breathing machines are obviously not the same
thing as eating, drinking, and breathing naturally. Not only are they
mechanical and not responsive to our feelings of hunger, thirst, and
breathlessness, but they also are troubling, uncomfortable, and efficient
-- just what human contact is not.
The way we talk of these treatments makes it easy to forget that they
are, in fact, medical procedures. We talk about "feeding" patients,
but the patients are not chewing, swallowing, or tasting through feeding
tubes. We also discuss how patients are "breathing" on ventilators,
making it easy to forget that the machine is doing most or all of
the breathing for them. Some of this language is convenient, but it
does make it make these machine seem almost natural. |
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Adapted from The
Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness,
by Joanne Lynn and Joan Harrold, copyright by Joanne Lynn, used by
permission of Oxford University Press.
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