Lenworth Jacobs and colleagues have a startling article
, "Trauma Death: Views of the Public and Trauma Professionals on Death and Dying From Injuries," in this month's Archives of Surgery. A brief interview about the article is available at MedPageToday.
Jacobs et al. found that 61.3% of the public and 20.2% of professionals believe that a miracle can a save person in a persistent vegetative state. 57.4% of the public and 19.5% of trauma professionals said divine intervention can save a person when doctors think treatment is futile.
On the tough question of when to stop life-sustaining treatment, 72.8% of the public and 92.6% of professionals think if there's no hope for recovery, the focus of care should shift to the comfort of the dying patients. Moreover, among the whopping 27.2% who disagreed, 86.2% said treatment aimed at recovery should continue regardless of cost and half of those said it should continue aggressive care even when it meant taking resources away from those with a better chance of life.
..................................
Kathryn Tucker, the legal affairs director for Compassion and Choices, has posted a 16-page report titled The 'Medical Right': Impact on End-of-Life Care. In her report, Tucker identifies the various players of the Religious Right and briefly outlines their impact on end-of-life care (though not futility disputes). From the abstract:
In The Medical Right, Remaking Medicine in Their Image (2007) (Medical Right Report or Report), the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) applies the term "Medical Right" to refer to religiously influenced medical, bioethics and health policy organizations of the Religious Right. This extremely important, well researched Report examines how the political agenda of the Religious Right, a political force comprised of fundamentalists primarily in the Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions, impacts reproductive health care. The growing influence of medical associations that apply fundamentalist Christian "biblical values" to research and policy affecting reproductive health care is explored. The Report reveals that many consortiums, think tanks, institutes, and programs apply Religious Right ideology to medical concerns under the mantle of "bioethics" or "biomedical ethics." These groups work with conservative advocacy, outreach, and legal organizations, along with politicians, to advance the policy agendas of the Religious Right. The confluence of conservative politics, fundamentalist religion, and ideologically influenced medicine and science, poses a threat to reproductive health care services, as discussed in detail in the Report.
While the Report is comprehensive in its discussion of the Religious Right's involvement in reproductive health issues, it addresses in only a cursory fashion how the Medical Right engages health law and policy governing end-of-life care. The purpose of this paper is to explore this area of concern more thoroughly.
The 'Medical Right': Impact on End-of-Life Care
8mm