🚀 go-pugleaf

David Moss (adm@ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au) wrote:

: Pain is just pain, it is never terminal. Some people who suffer from
: terminal diseases suffer pain. The pain can be relieved, but unfortunately
: the disease cannot be cured and they will die from it. Proper palliative
: care means they do not have to suffer pain during terminal illness.

  In an amicus brief filed before the Supreme Court in the US by
 a half dozen of the leading contemporary thinkers about ethical
 issues like this, the Philosophers drew the courts attention to
 a study that raises a horrific possibility.

  It seems that if you take a mammal, and administer 'palliative care'
 to its logical conclusion -- ie. aneasthetize the organism 'til
 it cannot respond to 'pain stimuli' -- when you examine its brain
 activity, you observe that the brain continues to respond to
 pain stimulus in the normal way.

  In other words, there is no evidence that exteme palliative care
 is even effective, and there is some evidence that it may, in fact,
 do nothing. You simply make the organism incapable of response. In
 other words, it's entirely possiible that patients treated in this
 way are still suffering, perhaps unbelievable agony, and are simply
 incapable of communicating their suffering to anyone else.

  The complete amicus brief, including this reference, is published in 
 the "New York Review of Books" from January or February, 1997. It
 seems to me to be mandatory reading for anyone interested in this
 question.