Decisions to Forgo Life-sustaining Therapy

American society appears to have been obsessed with advances in medical technology to a point where the inevitability of death, and therefore even its meaning, have been eclipsed. With this loss of meaning there has been a loss of any way for incorporating a realistic and caring mode of professional service for dying patients and their families. In the past 15 to 20 years we have seen the growth of the new field of biomedical ethics, which examines many aspects of the moral questions of decision making in modern medicine, ranging from reproductive issues to the questions of life-prolonging treatment. There has been considerable progress in society's ability to allow individuals to make decisions to forgo life-sustaining treatment, but the philosophical debate over whether withholding nutritional treatment is different from other life-sustaining treatments reflects a basic discomfort with the process of dying itself, a discomfort that does not seem to change appreciably. Thus, we must look beyond ethics, beyond the analytical and philosophical, to a broader notion of culture if we are to understand the meaning of dying and death

Bioethics · Engineering ethics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Political science · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Ethics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare · Ethics in medical practice · Law · Palliative Care and End-of-Life Issues · Philosophy · Psychology