Q: glen wrote:
So, the question remains, is there a medical benefit to bursting the
beliefs of a patient? And more refined, does the condition of the
patient matter? E.g. I can see how bursting my friend, who is getting
accupuncture for her neck pain, might help her. But how about a 50
year old prostate cancer patient with a good prognosis? Versus a 98
year old emphysema patient?
A: I have no doubt in the efficacy of placebos. What I doubt is
whether we have any sense about when to die or when to let another die.
Fairy-tales or not, the belief in an afterlife has allowed generations
of people to let go and die when their bodies no longer can hack it
without significant intervention. As recently as my grandparents
generation, people died when their pastor or priest came to them and
told them it was ok to die now.... gave them some last rites, etc...
they died within hours of that kind of "permission". They also died of
strokes and heart attacks without such permission. But for those left
behind, it was "God's will". I don't begrudge them these "Fairy
Tales". A few died long and lingering deaths, but by that time, it was
in a morphine haze. Also "God's Will" one presumes.
My challenge (for myself, my wife, and maybe by my example/extension my
peers, my children, etc.) is how to slip away gracefully without
that. I have two older peers who have left gracefully in the last few
years after a modest but not excruciatingly contrived struggle with
(presumed) terminal illnesses. They chose their time and place, but
most of all they chose not to struggle. Neither had benefit of a belief
in an afterlife, whether that be Harps and Clouds, Valhalla or Happy
Hunting Grounds.
My father died this year after most of a decade of dementia. He could
have lived longer. He could have died earlier. My mother's emotional
and practical care of him kept him here much longer than he would have
otherwise. He died within 2 months of her own needing a similar level
of care after a fall. She still had two meals a day with him and was
there to tuck him in at bedtime, being housed on the opposite side of
the same nursing home. But graciously, he took a left turn very
quickly at this point. It wasn't the drugs the doctors threw at him
that kept him alive, it was having someone there asking him to stay with
her every hour of every day.
My wife's father went roughly the same way. He was a poster child for
Alzheimers. Bright, cooperative, charming and always game to pretend he
knew what was going on, who you were, etc. Right up until he couldn't
focus his eyes and had to be reminded to swallow each hand-fed bite of
food. He had two emergency interventions fairly early in his
dementia... a seizure and pneumonia. Either would probably have killed
him without emergency response. The second incident, he was rescued in
spite of blatant DNR statements all around him. My wife and her mother
both agree that they would have allowed him to go at that point if they
had it to do again. Both of them have stated in no uncertain terms that
this is what they would want.
Both of my parents were adamant in the same way while they were still
highly viable. But once they went past a certain point, they
effectively have been clinging to a life they formerly would have said
was not worth living... who can say really?
The neoCon rhetoric about "death panels" drives me up the wall, and so
does all of the talk that suggests we have the right to live forever, or
that we would even want to. We have lost the benefit of a "cycle of
life" including death (and possibly afterlife/rebirth) and have tried to
replace it with a very secular and technological immortality.
Maybe once effective immortality is achieved, I would think differently,
but for now, it seems as suspicious (or inhumane?) than the Fairy Tale
of an afterlife or of a series of rebirths. I have neither the benefit
nor the burden of either "easy way out", but I don't feel in any
position to begrudge those who do.
- Steve
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