A twenty nine year old women with a brain tumor has
chosen to end her own life with her family and friends present. She has set a
date and a method.
Her situation is out of control, but is it
appropriate to take control where she can?
Maynard found out this spring she
has the most lethal form of
brain cancer. Doctors told her she may only have
six months to live. Her medication has drastically changed her appearance, but
she's decided to forgo aggressive treatment and die, as she puts it, with
dignity.
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brittany-maynard-dying-with-dignity-before-cancer-takes-her-life).
From a medical standpoint it’s clear that there are those within
that field that understand the choice this patient is making.
"University of Southern California Norris Westside Cancer Center
director Dr. David Agus said on "CBS This Morning." "We can take
away pain, we can take away symptoms that you may have, but at the same time,
we can't restore dignity," he said. He also sees her story as a two-fold
failure of the medical system. “One is, we can't treat this horrible
cancer," he said. "And the second is, she and most cancer patients
don't trust physicians to be able to alleviate most of the symptoms at the end
of life and restore dignity (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brittany-maynard-dying-with-dignity-before-cancer-takes-her-life).
It’s an area where the U.S.
health care system is falling short, according to renowned surgeon,
best-selling author and New Yorker writer Dr. Atul Gawande “You don’t
have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see,
over and over and over again, how medicine fails the people it is supposed to
help,” says Gawande, who practices at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Hope is not a plan. We find from our
trials that we are literally inflicting therapies on people that shorten their
lives and increase their suffering, due to an inability to come to good
decisions.” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/inside-frontline/how-should-doctors-help-terminally-ill-patients-prepare-for-death).
The bottom line is she going
to die and will do it her way.
This to me seems no different than anyone else who is contemplating suicide. they may not have brain cancer and short time to live. But, they do have problems too and want to die because of them. What defines "dignity"? do we think of someone who suffers through the pain and suffering of a disease to have no dignity? I understand that pain can get so bad that a person would want to die but that doesn't mean it should be acted upon.
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