Life-sustaining treatment : ethical considerations

Abstract

The aim of my contribution this evening is to propose a single criterion for decision-taking in the subject we are considering, and show how this criterion can lead us to certain very practical conclusions. Few other areas in medical practice highlight so forcefully the ethical significance of our belief that medicine deals primarily with persons, sick persons, and not with disease. The complexity of the issues involved brings us to the sometimes painful realization that while decisions regarding life-sustaining techniques are laid in doctors' laps, they do not concern solely a medical problem. So that, while such decisions are evidently taken on the basis of clinical judgements, the latter can never be the only, or the ultimate criterion, for I believe that the sustaining of life through artificial techniques is fundamentally not a medical problem!