This book explores the use of sedation without hydration in the terminally ill and dying. It will challenge. inform and disturb those who consider the hospice movement to be beyond reproach.
Gillian Craig came upon the practice of sedation without hydration in a hospice in the UK in 1990 and was shocked. She took matters up within the medical profession and wrote a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics that launched a fierce debate This book describes how the hydration debate progressed between 1994 and 2004.
When launching the debate in 1994 Raanon (Gillon editor of the .Journal of Medical Ethics wrote - Dr Gillian Craig and her commentator Eric Wilkes raise a xariety of important questions about ethical aspects of palliative care that deserve careful reflection - Those words remain true today. Despite the publication of guidelines on the ethicai use of artificial hydration in terminally ill people in 1997 sedation without hydration is still wide1y practiced. The question at issue remains ‘Has palliative medicine gone too far'
No Water-No Life traces the origins of”comfort care only” for the dying to the work of an American theologian Paul Ramsay in the 1 970s. Key publications from the Journal of Medical Ethics and other professional journals in the UK and North America are included to illustrate the more recent professional debate. Case reports bring the work to life. illustrate the plight of patients and relatives and show how the medical profession deals with dissent. A chapter on legal aspects looks at the doctrine of double effect. The book is highly topical and takes readers to the cutting edge of medicine and law.
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