Pain Control Doesn't Kill
This is very good news for dying patients and their families. A new study has been released demonstrating that pain control using opioids (narcotics) in end of life care "poses an extremely small risk of hastened death in this population [hospice patients]."
The results of this study undermines the pro-euthanasia meme that using strong pain control often leads to earlier death, and hence intentional mercy killing is little different than treating pain. Moreover, and more urgently, it should make doctors less reluctant to aggressively treat pain, which remains a problem in the clinical setting. For as the study points out:"Undertreatment of pain is a far more pressing concern than is the risk of hastened death in those with advanced disease, and physicians should be encouraged to use opioids effectively to relieve suffering at the end of life."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 11:17 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Anything that allows a patient to live fully and productively, even at the end of his or her life, should be received openly by all doctors; hearing this should open the way for better pain management. People should be allowed to live every moment that they inhabit their bodies.
As an aside - when someone explains to me how a mode of thought is able to infect a person and reproduce like a virus, and does so to my satisfaction, I'll accept the term "meme," but until then, wouldn't "the pro-euthanasia movement's belief" be a more accurate term?
Tabs: I hate the term, too. But it has sunk into the consciousness and I try to stay as current as this old gray matter permits.
The public consciousness, I meant.
From my reading about cases like the Richard Paey case, I'd say that the biggest impediment left is the DEA.
Or the *perception* whether or not true, of the DEA.
I'll admit to having problems following the article itself. ("Dammit Jim, I'm a philosopher, not a scientist!" Star Trek allusion alert.)
I gather the point is supposed to be that it's the rate at which the dosage of an opioid like morphine is increased that can kill, not the absolute dosage. Is that right?
I do know that a doctor was eventually prosecuted after Katrina for deliberately overdosing patients stranded in a hospital, and I believe part of the evidence was finding huge doses of morphine in the bodies. Shouldn't this sort of inference be legitimate and possible? It almost seems like it would be impossible ever to conclude that someone was killed--deliberately or unintentionally--by morphine overdose given this reasoning. Or perhaps would part of the evidence brought in the defense be that the dosage was increased slowly?
I'm a little wary of the injunction to go ahead and sock it to 'em with pain medication, as if you couldn't do any harm that way...
("Dammit Jim, I'm a philosopher, not a scientist!"
LOL.
I co-authored a book on this, Power Over Pain, with a genius physician. (Actually, I translated from medicaleze.) You can titrate up morphine as pain increases. So that a dying, 90 pound woman, with cancer throughout her body can take a dose of morphine that would kill three people, and only be out of pain.
That being said, people can be intentionally overdosed. I assume in the NO case, which I haven't commented upon purposely because the evidence isn't in, there was sufficient dosage, when combined with the patient's diagnoses, gave rise to a presumption that death was caused intentionally. So, someone incapacitated by a stroke could be killed by a dose of morphine that would barely touch the pain of an advanced cancer patient.
I believe in aggressive pain control. For that, the doctor must be trusted to value your life, and not desire your death.
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