Accepting Palliatives or Searching for Cures

Michael McCarthy deserves praise for bringing the issue of palliative care to public attention. As a nurse I often see people who delay seeking treatment or avoid medical care entirely, out of fear. They hear tell of family wishes being reasoned apart, patient denial whittled away, the confusion of the medical community’s economic self-interest with medical ethics.

It’s getting harder for all of us to separate the fear of dying from the fear of some of the perversions of healing. Previously unheard-of acts of violence by grief-stricken relatives occur now in and out of hospitals with a certain regularity. More and more frequently, people resort to suicide in what has become the paradox of patients protecting themselves from treatments they often feel powerless to refuse.

KATE McFADDEN, Arcadia