The DNR: Is It Morally Wrong To Let Someone Die?

The ethical principles for nurses to practice with beneficence and no maleficence. This legal battle between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her family was an ethical debate between continuing artificial life or remove her feeding tube by the request of her husband. Using the theories of utilitarianism and deontology can be applied or considered in making the most ethically correct resolution. The cases are very complex and raise many moral and ethical issues. The cases have brought awareness to society of “the importance of discussing end-of-life issues with family members and underscores how an advance directive, a living will and/or durable power of attorney for health care, are a healthcare proxy clarifies and provides evidence of the wishes of an individual regarding end-of-life decisions. Terri Schiavo should impress upon laypersons and professionals alike the uncertainty of the context in which issues of continuation and termination are argued ethically. Nobody knows what Mrs. Schiavo would have wanted. She left no advance directive and in its absence her husband says one thing and her parents

The situation in which one can observed unethical behavior would be in a hospital facility, where the wife of a spouse would have the sole priority in the decision making process. Actually, this situation was a dilemma that had happened to the researcher family, where she felt that she was being deprived of her rights to know about her brother’s situation at the hospice care. His wife was in charge when his life started to deteriorate and eventually was put on life support. According to English, Romano-Critchley, and Sommerville (2001), examined the human rights to “moral and legal differences between non treatment and intentionally hastening death of patient” (p. 413) has been an ethical topic for the past few years. The studied have reported

This assignment will discuss a case involving an individual known to me. It centres on the real and contentious issue of the “right to die”, specifically in the context of physician-assisted death. This issue is widely debated in the public eye for two reasons. The first considers under what conditions a person can choose when to die and the second considers if someone ever actually has a ‘right to die’. The following analysis will consider solutions to the ethical dilemma of physician-assisted death through the lens of three ethical theories. It will also take into account the potential influence of an individual’s religious beliefs

Very often, deliberate decisions are made which results in the end of a life. For example, a person could be kept on life support, but instead, a family member or other significant person might choose to switch off the life support machine resulting in the official death of a patient. There is also the case that resuscitation of a patient may eventually prove to be trivial and a doctor might suggest just making the patient as comfortable as possible until their eventual passing. In the above situations, a medical professional’s decisions would not be questioned or doubted. It is conventional practice (Warnock and MacDonald 2008).

A patient is lying on a hospital bed hooked up to several machines regulating his bodily functions. The doctor has informed the family that the patient is brain dead. His spouse makes the decision to pull the plug but his mother argues against it. It is the mothers opinion that her son is still alive, and deserves to be treated like a person, even though his brain is no longer functioning. The spouse holds the opinion that any trace of her loved one has left with the death of his brain and only his body remains. Suddenly, both remember the patients wishes to not be sustained on life support, and they collectively decide to pull the plug. This example illustrates the central debate

In today’s society, suicide, and more controversially, physician assisted suicide, is a hotly debated topic amongst both every day citizens and members of the medical community. The controversial nature of the subject opens up the conversation to scrutinizing the ethics involved. Who can draw the line between morality and immorality on such a delicate subject, between lessening the suffering of a loved one and murder? Is there a moral dissimilarity between letting someone die under your care and killing them? Assuming that PAS suicide is legal under certain circumstances, how stringent need be these circumstances? The patient must be terminally ill to qualify for voluntary physician-assisted suicide, but in the eyes of the non-terminal patients with no physical means to end their life, the ending of their pain through PAS may be worth their death; at what point is the medical staff disregarding a patient’s autonomy? Due to the variability of answers to these questions, the debate over physician-assisted suicide is far from over. However, real life occurrences happen every day outside the realm of debate and rhetoric, and decisions need to be made.

The ethics of physician-assisted suicide of terminally ill patients is a very ambiguous topic. Critics see physician-assisted deaths as normalization of the growing death culture that started in 1973 with the legalization of abortion.

There are many questions to be asked when dealing with the end of life for a patient. It comes down to pain, suffering, and comfort when dealing with patients with PVS. There are many regulations and some laws that help guide physicians to make the right decision when it is time to tell the family/surrogates what they should do. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the cultural meaning behind suffering in the context of persistent vegetative state patients when there is possible abuse. Does the use of regulations that we have today help physicians make good judgement calls on people who are facing their imminent death? Is it morally right to take away a parent’s power to decide what is best for their child? Is it morally okay for a physician to make a decision for someone else’s child instead of other family? These question will also be explored based on a case from the AMA Journal of Ethics from a little girl who was presumed to be in a persistent vegetative state.

The right to assisted suicide is a controversial topic in healthcare in the United States. The debate goes back and forth about whether a dying competent patient has the right to die with the help of a physician. There is an abundant amount of people in the United States are against it because of religious beliefs. Some individuals believe that it is not morally right for a physician to assist in a patient’s death because it is not respecting the dying patient. Physician-patient assisted suicide divide physicians because many physicians differ when it comes to separating voluntarily killing a patient or killing the patient to respect their dying wish. Patients, who are gravely ill or in their final stages of life, often request for doctors to help them pass on by requesting medications such as morphine to help speed up their death because they are in pain. In healthcare, medical technology has come a long way to help lengthen a person’s life span. If a patient is actively dying from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), there are respiratory machines to aid in giving that patient oxygen to breath in more air which one could not achieve if the respiratory machine was not available to them. Medicine is intended to prevent diseases or allay the pain and suffering that a patient endures while going through medical treatments. Patients that are terminally ill should have the right to assisted suicide by a physician because it

DNRs or ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders are always a tough subject with patients and families. I have found that patients/families are either all for it or completely against it. Many of the problems associated with DNR designation arise due to disagreement about the meaning of DNR or do not resuscitate. “Health care providers themselves often disagree about the meaning of DNR.” (Tucker, D. A. 1996). One of the barriers to effective communication in this case study would be lack of understanding. Cindy’s husband may not have clearly understood what designating his wife DNR meant and after completing the paperwork, he realized he needed more information. With each healthcare provider having a different definition of DNR it is no wonder Cindy’s husband

The thin line between life and death has become an ethical issue many health care providers and the government have long tried to ignore. The understanding that life begins at birth, and ends when the heartbeat and breathing have ceased has long been deemed factual. Medical technologies have changed this with respirators, artificial defibrillators, and transplants (Macionis, 2009). “Thus medical and legal experts in the United States define death as an irreversible state involving no response to stimulation, no movement or breathing, no reflexes, and no indication of brain activity” (Macionis, 2009, p. 436).

With major advancement in medical treatments, it is now possible to keep a patient alive, which would not have been possible in former times. This has made end of life issue one of the most controversial issues in healthcare. Medical improvements have set the stage for ethical and legal controversies about not only the patient’s rights but also the family’s rights and the medical profession’s proper role. It is critical that any decision made in such situation is ethical and legal to preserve the rights of the patient and also protect the healthcare institution involved. It is very important when making decisions to discontinue treatments to make sure all other alternatives have been explored.

Every person wants to feel like they are in control of as many things as possible, especially when they have no control over their terminal illness. To some, this may mean doing things they have always wanted to, all the way up to making every possible decision they can when it comes to their final moments, their advanced directives. While some that are scared of the end still may want extraordinary measures taken to try and prolong life for even a short amount of time, many hospice patients elect to make themselves a DNR (do not resuscitate), meaning if their heart stops beating, no person will begin CPR. Other countries have also followed suit with these types of standards, passing certain laws to uphold their patients’ autonomy during hospice care. In Asia, the “Natural Death Act” was implemented to guarantee a patient’s right to choose to be a DNR, and subsequently, the “Patient Autonomy Act” came next, which gave the patient the right to decline any treatment according to their own will (Cheng, Chen, & Chiu, 2016, p. 293). While these choices are universal in our health care system in the U.S., how these choices implemented into action is the key. When in a palliative care hospital setting, patients will have machines and IV lines attached to them, nurses and other healthcare personnel coming in to help them to and from the restroom or bedpan, and other types of embarrassing and

This paper will present an argument of how the process of do not resuscitate (DNR) results in an ethical dilemma for workers in the healthcare field. In presenting the argument, this paper will also address the following three course learning objectives: 1) explain the legal rights of individuals as they interact with health care services, 2) analyze the monitoring systems that ensure human rights, legal aspects, and quality

Autonomy can override beneficence when life-support is withdrawn (Prozgar, 2010). In addition, when a physician takes the position of withdrawing life-supporting equipment, the principle of non-maleficence is severed. Since helping patients die violates the physician’s virtue of duty to save lives,” distributed justice is served by releasing a room in the intensive care unit for a patient who has a higher chance of resolving their medical problems (Pozgar, G. 2010). There are so many inflict fuzzy gray areas and ideas about conflicting DNR policies that political disputes had to go to the courts to sort out the issues legally.