Word: childrene
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...intriguing new study led by doctors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston aimed to explore that question through a series of interviews conducted with 141 parents whose children had died of cancer. The study reports that 19 parents said they had thought about asking a doctor to hasten their child's death and that 13 parents actually discussed it with caregivers. When asked by the study authors, an additional 34% of the parents said that in retrospect, they would have considered intentionally ending their child's life if the child had been in uncontrollable pain. "The fear...
...study highlights the difficulty in treating dying children. Parents find it intolerable to witness their child in pain. Yet few parents, understandably, wish to concede that their child's illness is incurable. And that reluctance, combined with an uncertain outlook for many pediatric cancers, makes it much more difficult for caregivers to map out end-of-life treatment plans for seriously ill children. "An uncertain prognosis should be a signal to initiate, rather than to delay, palliative care," wrote the authors of a 2008 study conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, Children's Hospital, on pediatric palliative practices...
...Dana-Farber research is the first of its kind. Part of an ongoing, larger examination of pediatric palliative care, the survey asked the parents about their attitudes toward hastening the death of their children (by the time of the study, the children's deaths had occurred between one and 10 years earlier) as well as their more current reactions to two hypothetical vignettes about children with fatal cancers. One vignette involved uncontrollable pain at the end of life, while the other involved irreversible coma. In both situations, the parents became more likely to endorse hastening death as the level...
...study was small, and the children of the parents who participated were treated at three hospitals (two in Boston and one in Minneapolis-St. Paul), which does not lend much statistical power to its findings. But given the considerable social stigma about euthanasia in the U.S., where only two states, Oregon and Washington, have legalized physician-assisted suicide, researchers think that the percentage of parents admitting to having thoughts about hastening death is probably lower than reality. (See how to prevent illness...
...Terminally ill adults' pain, for instance, is often alleviated through morphine-induced sedation - what is known as palliative sedation. Often, palliative sedation results in unconsciousness, and may also be accompanied by withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments - a legal option for end-of-life pain relief. But parents of young children are much more reluctant to consider this approach. "For parents, every minute that their dying child is alert and awake is precious," says Wolfe, who cautions that the study's results reflect instances in which there was 100% certainty a child would die soon. "So while we have legal options...