Help for the Dying in Our Modern Age

THE woman, a doctor herself, had just been through a most painful ordeal. She had watched her 94-year-old grandmother die in the hospital intensive-care unit following cancer surgery that “she never wanted.”

“My tears at her funeral were not for the fact of her death, for my grandmother had lived a long, full life,” the doctor wrote. “I cried for the pain she had endured, and for the lack of fulfillment of her wishes. I cried for my mother and her siblings, for their sense of loss and frustration.”

You may wonder, though, about the possibility of helping such a seriously ill person. This doctor continues:

“Mostly, I cried for myself: for the overwhelming guilt I felt at not being able to save her from pain and indignity, and for the woeful inadequateness I felt as a physician, unable to heal, unable to relieve suffering. For nowhere in my training had I been taught an acceptance of death or dying. Illness was the enemy​—to be fought at every turn, with every last resource. Death was a defeat, a failure; chronic disease a constant reminder of the physician’s impotence. The image of my little grandmother staring at me with frightened eyes while on a ventilator in an ICU haunts me to this day.”

This loving granddaughter crystallized a complex ethical, medicolegal issue that now is being debated in courtrooms and hospitals around the world: What is best for the hopelessly ill in our technologically advanced age?

Some have the view that everything medically possible should be done for each person who is sick. This view is expressed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons: “The obligation of the physician to the comatose, vegetative, or developmentally disabled patient does not depend upon the prospect for recovery. The physician must always act on behalf of the patient’s well-being.” This means providing all the treatment or medical help that can possibly be applied. Do you feel that this is always best for a person who is gravely ill?

To many people that course certainly sounds laudable. Yet, in the past few decades, experience with technologically advanced medicine has given rise to a new and different viewpoint. In a 1984 landmark paper entitled “The Physician’s Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients,” a panel of ten experienced physicians concluded: “A decrease in aggressive treatment of the hopelessly ill patient is advisable when such treatment would only prolong a difficult and uncomfortable process of dying.” Five years later the same doctors published an article of the same title that was styled “A Second Look.” Considering the same problem, they made an even plainer statement: “Many physicians and ethicists . . . have concluded, therefore, that it is ethical to withdraw nutrition and hydration [fluids] from certain dying, hopelessly ill, or permanently unconscious patients.”

We cannot dismiss such comments as simple theorizing or as a mere debate that has no real bearing on us. Numerous Christians have been faced with agonizing decisions in this connection. Should a hopelessly ill loved one be kept alive on a respirator? Should intravenous feeding or other artificial feeding methods be applied to a terminally ill patient? When the situation is hopeless, should all the financial means of a relative, or of an entire family, be expended to pay for treatment, perhaps involving transportation to a distant center to receive the most advanced treatment?

You no doubt appreciate that such questions are not easy to answer. Much as you would want to help an ill friend or loved one, if you had to face these questions you might wonder: ‘What guidance does the Christian have? What resources are available for help? Most important, what do the Scriptures say on the subject?’