Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
- clinical ethics
- quality/value of life/personhood
- end-of-life
- allowing minors to die
- allocation of health care resources
Work done within the realm of what is sometimes called ‘descriptive ethics’ brings two questions readily to mind: How can empirical findings, in general, inform normative debates? and How can these empirical findings, in particular, inform the normative debate at hand? Brick et al 1 confront these questions in their novel investigation of public views about lives worth living and the permissibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from critically ill infants. Mindful of the is-ought gap, the authors suggest modestly that their data ‘may be useful when constructing guidelines for clinical practice’. In this commentary, I consider some potential limitations on the generalisability of these data in the context of policy and clinical practice, limitations which may in turn serve as directions for future empirical research.
The authors’ study presented participants six case scenarios, five of which involved the possibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from critically ill infants. The results revealed that “[a]lmost all respondents agreed that at some level of quality of life, life may be of no benefit or worse than death for an infant” and that “participants significantly favoured withdrawal of treatment for the most severe cases.”
One salient detail in these scenarios …
Footnotes
Contributors RN is the sole author.
Funding Baylor College of Medicine, Center for Medical Ethics & Health Polic.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Worth living or worth dying? The views of the general public about allowing disabled children to die
- Ethical issues in nutrition support: a view from the coalface
- Artificial nutrition and hydration in the patient with advanced dementia: is withholding treatment compatible with traditional Judaism?
- Artificial nutrition and hydration for children and young people towards end of life: consensus guidelines across four specialist paediatric palliative care centres
- Withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration from minimally conscious and vegetative patients: family perspectives
- Why I wrote my advance decision to refuse life-prolonging treatment: and why the law on sanctity of life remains problematic
- End-of-life care in Toronto neonatal intensive care units: challenges for physician trainees
- Crossing the line? Ethics of parenteral nutrition in paediatric neurodisability complicated by intestinal failure
- Nurses’ attitudes towards artificial food or fluid administration in patients with dementia and in terminally ill patients: a review of the literature
- How family caregivers' medical and moral assumptions influence decision making for patients in the vegetative state: a qualitative interview study