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a good death - 5/17/2007 1:27:13 AM

LadyEllen

Posts: 10931
Joined: 6/30/2006
From: Stourport-England
Status: offline

We had a re-run this week of a TV programme originally broadcast last year, about death and dying in the UK. It featured several cases of people at the end of their lives and also surveys about the subject.

What came across, was that there is enormous distress and disquiet about the way in which dying is managed in hospitals in the UK;
- people left to die in agony for days, because they have had the maximum dose of pain relief (the maximum dose is relevant how, when someone is dying anyway?)
- people left to die in indignity, in their own faeces and with wet sheets
- lives prolonged along with severe pain, when such management is no longer useful or productive
- family treated as if they are in the way

It would seem that much of this arises from the idea that hospital is about making people well, and they are not set up for assisting a good death or even for dealing with failure in their aim of curing. Palliative care doctors are also in short supply, and regarded as one step above psychiatrists by their peers, in a country with the same population as France but with half the number of doctors in the first place.

What also became clear, was that dying and death remain taboo. Very few ever discuss it, even fewer have any sort of living will. The issue remains dark, and then it is too late.

To me, all of this seems ridiculous. For what reason would someone be left to die for days in pain? Of what benefit is it to restrict their morphine to safe doses? How can medical staff leave someone to die like this?

At the same time, I know the reasons. A doctor who gives more morphine than the recommended dose could be arrested for murder and have his life ruined for his mercy. And such a law comes not from any sensible analysis of the situation but from the influence of Christian ideas about life and death which are insinuated into the lives of all of us, when we have a population which at the most is only 10% Christian. We have had bills presented in Parliament before now, to permit doctors the freedom to participate in assisted death - all of which have failed amid howls of protest against the idea from those who feel that such actions violate the laws of a God that few outside their circles have any belief in.

So, would you prefer to have an assisted death at your request should you be terminally ill? Or would you prefer to suffer a prolonged death in pain?

Assisted death is now permitted in Switzerland. That the most recently publicised British participant in that scheme was a doctor who had seen the way that dying is handled in the UK, says a lot I feel. That her family almost got charged with a criminal offence for travelling with her, says a lot about the UK too.

E

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