Word: patients
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early on in no way alters her right to a dignified death later in life, argues Emmanuel Debost, a general practitioner who treated and supported Sébire even before her fatal disease was diagnosed. "It also tries to discredit that right to a dignified end by suggesting my patient was somehow guilty in the terminal evolution of her disease...
...things explosive in Lebanon," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East Center in Beirut. Still, Bellemare added in his report that experience has taught the U.N.'s legal team that "this process is not instantaneous." So it looks like the Lebanese will have to be patient for a while longer...
Terminal sedation is the decision to keep dying patients, who cannot be made comfortable in any other way, unconscious until they die. As a last resort, such drug-induced sedation is legal in most countries including the U.S., and it is widely accepted as a mainstay of end-of-life care. Opponents of terminal sedation argue, however, that some doctors misuse the practice as a substitute for euthanasia. A study published last week in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) indicates this may be the case in the Netherlands. Physician-assisted suicide has been legal there - though highly regulated - since...
Palliative sedation is common practice in hospitals worldwide. Burn victims or patients in intensive-care units are often sedated while doctors perform sensitive procedures or determine the next best pain-management treatment. One thing that distinguishes routine sedation from terminal sedation is that the latter often goes hand-in-hand with cutting off other medications or removing a patient's feeding tubes. On its face, this may sound to many people as automatically hastening a patient's death. But that's not the case, says Dr. Ira Byock, chair of palliative medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, who has performed terminal...
Still, what's troubling about the new findings, Byock says, is the implication that doctors may be issuing the treatment either too early or without the patient's consent - or that they are using it to sidestep legal requirements to perform euthanasia. Nine percent of the patients in the study had in fact asked for euthanasia before being sedated. "Sedating someone until they die is a one-size-fits-all solution, but thoughtful pain management requires time and money," Byock says, noting that plans should always be discussed with patients and families well in advance. "One shouldn...