時折捲るエコノミスト誌に“死ぬ権利”についての短い記事が出ておりました。
重病患者にある意味“死んだ方がましかどうか”聞き取った調査の結果の紹介記事です。
辛さが図示(写真)されていますが、排泄系統が管に繋がれると生きているのが嫌になるようです。(短い期間でしたが、ステントが入っているだけで情けない思いでした。)
人間は管より成れる日短(川崎展宏)
何と言っても、ポックリに勝るものなしですなぁ。
日がな碁をうちて晩酌ほろ酔いで風呂に入りて父逝きにけり(石川義倫)
The right to die (August 6th 2016 P66 - The Economist)
“The fate worse than death” is a journalistic cliche, used this week alone to describe a visit to the dentist (in a British newspaper) and the plot arc of a character in J.K.Rowling's new “Harry Potter” play (in an American magazine). But for the terminally ill, such fatds do exist：death really can seem preferable to a lifetime of pain and suffering. A growing movement, including this newspaper, thus seeks to legalise - with stringent safeguards - doctor-assisted suicide around the world.
Yet doctors are taught to keep patients alive regardless of the circumstances, says Emily Rubin of the University of Pennsylvania. A paper by her and her colleagues, just published in JAMA International Medicine, attempts to give statistical rigour to scientific hunches about end-of-life care. Over an eight-month period, beginning in July 2015, her team surveyed 180 patients who had been admitted to a hospital in Philadelphia suffering from serious illness, including lung and heart disease. All participants were over 60, and were asked by medical staff to hypothesise whether they woule prefer to die than be in progressively worse vegetative states.
As the chart shows, half or more said that they would consider being incontinent, being unable to get out of bed or relying on a breathing machine to stay alive as fates worse than death. Being so debilitated that they were reliant on food delivered via a tube, were constantly confused or required round-the-clock care were judged similarly by a third or more of respondents.
Although it draws on a small sample, Dr Rubin's study adds data to the discussion. Too much of the debate around the “right to die” focuses on individual opinion, often that of campaigners (on both sides) who are in rude health imagining how they would feel were they faced with severe illness. And when the views of those who are actually afflicted by ill-health are considered, the cases cited are often the hard ones that proverbially make bad law. Asking people approaching, or threatened with death, how they feel about it, and the moment at which they would like it to come, is a welcome development. Both sides of the doctor-assisted-dying debate should pay attention to it.
