Displaying items by tag: przerwanie terapii

The aim of this article is an attempt to evaluate the following issues related to the last stage of illness and death: discontinue of artificial nutrition and hydration, discontinue or refrain from life-saving therapy or palliative sedation.
Mentioned cases are borderline situations. Medical consultants, taking the decisions of removing the tube feeding, discontinuing or not taking up the procedure which causes maintain the patient’s life or applying terminal sedation, are aware, that above will lead to patient’s death. This is the reason why above situations cause lots of doubts, the most important of which is a question, whether we are dealing with passive euthanasia. Is it possible to carry out the border between forbidden “kill” and permitted “let die”. Any attempt to answer this question is a kind of consensus.

Published in Issue 3/2012