Can you imagine lying helpless while well-meaning people discuss ending your life by switching off your life support? A BBC1 documentary shown on July 13th caught the moment when 43 year old Richard Rudd by a flick of his eyes managed to save himself in the nick of time. His loving family believed they were doing what he would want, since he had said, before the motorbike accident that left him paralysed, that he would not wish to go on living in such a situation. He was apparently in a locked-in state, able to hear and understand but not communicate.
During a parliamentary debate, the MP Clare Curtis-Thomas spoke of her mother having similarly managed, by blinking, to reverse an earlier request to die.
Dominica Roberts of the ProLife Alliance said that these cases show, as we have repeatedly warned, how very dangerous so-called “living wills” can be. How many patients have died because they were unable to make people understand that they had changed their minds? Palliative care doctors have repeatedly pointed out that, although a competent well-informed patient is of course entitled to decide against treatment, people cannot know exactly what condition they might be in, or how they would feel, or what treatment might have been developed since they wrote their wishes. Palliative care has not only improved immensely in the last thirty years, but it continues to develop. It is far better to leave it to doctors to do their best for a patient, with the understanding that although sometimes treatment may be unnecessarily burdensome compared with any benefit, no one should ever decide that someone would be better off dead. Treatment may be judged to be futile, but a human life should never be so.
Even more frightening, how many helpless locked-in patients have heard doctors deciding to starve or dehydrate them to death by removing medically assisted feeding or liquid?
There is urgent need of legislation to reverse the Bland case, under which some patients have been condemned to this particularly painful death.
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