BETTER KILL 'EM FAST, BEFORE THEY CHANGE THEIR MINDS:

As a Life Ebbs, the Ultimate Family Quarrel (PAM BELLUCK, 9/27/04, NY Times)

What makes end-of-life decisions so confounding is that while doctors can bring a patient to the brink of survival and give families more detailed and incremental choices, they cannot predict how each choice will turn out. That has made it much harder for families to know what the patient would have wanted, and harder to anticipate the consequences of their decisions.

"When you say someone's unconscious or in a coma, we have an idea of what that means, but then you start to say they're in a persistent vegetative state or a minimally conscious state," said Professor Berg, the law and bioethics professor at Case Western Reserve. "Medical technology gets better at pinpointing what is wrong and what is working, and that makes things much more complicated."

Even if a person has previously expressed preferences for handling life-or-death decisions, it is often impossible for families to know for sure.

"So much of the way people think about end-of-life decisions is a moving target," said Dr. Steele of the Eastern Maine Medical Center. "If you go to a quadriplegic and ask them, a lot of them will want to die. A year later, a lot will want to live."

Assuming someone hasn't already forced them out the exit.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 1, 2004 2:44 PM