To me the medical profession seems to be bitter and twisted because the Liverpool Care Pathway was condemned quite rightly for using methods designed and developed for hospices on the population at large. There were even reports of bonus schemes rewarding terminations.
Since the demise of LCP there has been an outpouring of ‘end of life care’ rhetoric which seems to have seeped into every media crack available and you can’t open a paper, magazine or news site without being confronted with help to die schemes seemingly trying to justify a ‘son of LCP’.
The first problem with these ideas of course is defining who is terminally ill because it seems to me that unless you are god you cannot predict death reliably, and we have had reports of people who ‘wake up’ in the morgue as proof of that.
Next as to the wishes of people who are ‘terminally ill’ to be helped to die, how can you be certain that their wish to die is not the result of intimidation by relatives keen to get their hands on their inheritance and lord knows, the aristocracy has been doing that since the year dot, or wanting to die because of guilt at ‘feeling a burden’ .
If we let these schemes become routine in our hospitals how long will it be before medics are despatching everyone over a certain age because they look very ill and when will this lead to an unwritten acceptance that anyone over a certain age is not worth saving.
My real worry is that anyone who is vulnerable or disabled may be eventually be seen as not worth spending time and money on and perhaps we might be able to get some mileage out of their organs anyway.
Be wary of ‘end of life’ propaganda unless it is in the context of a hospice. Anything else is euthanasia by another name.
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