Ethics and the End of Life
Sometimes, when a human life is coming to an end, the most crucial aspect of providing holistic ethical health care is not maintaining life, but maintaining a semblance of familiarity and routine for the individual in question, and creating an equitable solution that satisfies the broad range of beliefs present amongst the members of all of the dying individual's loved ones. The recent case of Terri Shaivo, one must remember, came to the forefront of the national consciousness not because Terri Shaivo was unique in having her feeding tube removed -- as her husband Michael Shaivo reminded the media and the courts quite frequently, such a medical event transpires every day in hospices and hospitals where critically ill patients are being treated. What was so unusual about the Shaivo case was the level of disagreement amongst the woman's loved ones, about what the woman would have wanted, could she have articulated her full intentions and desires about what was a quality life. The devoutly Roman Catholic parents and Terri Shaivo's husband profoundly disagreed as to the woman's beliefs about...
According to The New York Times reporter John Schwartz, "Montefiore is innovative in giving its bioethicists a central role in mediating end-of-life issues among doctors, nurses, patients and family members." (Schwartz, 2005) Montefiore's program uses the tools of mediation, common in business and divorce but relatively new to medicine, in the way that it facilitates communication amongst competing family interests, emotions and systems of belief that could and should, the article suggests, provide a model for health care institutions dealing with the terminally and chronically ill across the country.
The article affirms the notion that at the end of life, the living relations of the dying have rights, needs, and viewpoints that must be articulated for their own mental health. It is ethically and psychologically necessary to provide them with such…
