When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while. But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures.
We talk, as a society, of our need to get health care costs under control. Conservatives, in particular, insist that Medicare must be reformed. Here is an enormously expensive drug that largely doesn’t work, has serious side effects and can no longer be marketed as a breast cancer therapy. Yet insurers, including Medicare, will continue to cover it. If we’re not willing to say no to a drug like Avastin, then what drug will we say no to?
Scandals, lawsuits, a growing focus on commercialization and self-promotion, and dentists who prescribe excessive treatments are tarnishing the profession's image, according to a presentation on ethics at the recent ADA annual session in Las Vegas.
Early in 2011, Illinois joined the ranks of states that recognize civil unions between both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. The law gives partners in these unions “the same legal obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits as are afforded or recognized by the law of Illinois to spouses.” Despite the fact that Illinois and most other states still reserve marriage for opposite-sex couples, the option of civil unions will make it easier for some couples to make health care decisions for one another should one of them become incapacitated. Surrogate decision-makers for health care are a significant topic for everyone, but the issue has special resonance for same-sex couples because the law in most jurisdictions excludes same-sex couples from the benefits that marriage and some civil unions confer in those health care decisions. Timothy F. Murphy, "Surrogate Health Care Decisions and Same-Sex Relationships," Hastings Center Report 41, no. 3 (2011): 24-27.
As of 2008, surrogacy is legal and openly practised in various places; Japan, however, has no regulations or laws regarding surrogacy. This paper reports the situation of surrogacy in Japan and in five other regions (the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Korea and France) to clarify the pros and cons of prohibiting surrogacy, along with the problems and issues relating to surrogacy compensation.
[Historically] the public has remained suspicious of much experimental research which, as a result, was often done on prisoners, orphans, the mentally challenged, and other captive populations without informed consent. But with the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s, everything changed. Highly organised groups of gay men, confronted with a mysterious life-threatening disease, aggressively advocated for greater research funding and for early inclusion in experimental trials. Their arguments were persuasive enough for the US Food and Drug Administration to revise its protocols, expediting the drug approval process. [A number of moral concerns are raised by this shift in policy] and although groups such as Abigail's Alliance have urged US courts to find a constitutional right for terminally ill patients to get access to unapproved experimental therapies, recent rulings have gone in the other direction.
Although it comes to us all, most of us would rather not think about death. But in Oregon they have - and for more than 10 years, assisted suicides have been legal there. Katharine Whitehorn visits the US state that believes in death with dignity.