Tài liệu Báo cáo khoa học: "Medical treatment for the terminally ill: the ‘risk of unacceptable badness’"

Recent times have witnessed much turmoil regarding the ‘life is sacred at any cost’ maxim [1]. Current technology is capable of indiscriminately maintaining some of the vital functions of the body, but the same technology does not necessarily allow us to heal underlying disease processes [2]. An unintended side effect of modern technological advances has been the plausibility of maintaining moribund patients in a state of suspended animation for prolonged and sometimes indefinite periods [3]. Also, advanced resuscitation techniques make it possible to convert death into life-in-death [4]. Patients may be stalled in suspended animation; they are not alive in the sense the we enjoy life but neither are they able to die as long as nutrition, hydration, ventilation, and perfusion are assured. In many cases reanimation of such patients is clearly impossible, even with the advanced medical technologies available to us.