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No Surprise: Religious
Views Influence Physicians' Views on End-of-Life Care Part One of Three By Dave Andrusko Good evening and welcome to TN&V. Lots of politics in Parts Two and Three. Over at National Right to Life News Today (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org), an important update from NRLC and some very, very encouraging news out of Minnesota about its "Positive Alternatives" program. Please send your comments on Today's News & Views and National Right to Life News Today to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha.
It's often very interesting (and illustrative) to see how different publications headline the same story. For example, from the British publication "The Guardian," we read, "Atheist doctors 'more likely to hasten death.'" From the Los Angeles Times, "Religious views influence treatment offered by doctors." And from the British "Medical News Today," "Doctors' Religious Faith Influences End Of Life Care." Each story takes as its jumping off point a study that appeared online August 23 in the Journal of Medical Ethics, "The role of doctors' religious faith and ethnicity in taking ethically controversial decisions during end-of-life care," by Dr. Clive Seale. A professor in the Centre for Health Sciences at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, Dr. Seale surveyed "doctors in specialisms [specialties] likely to care for people at the end of life, such as neurology, elderly and palliative care but also general practice," according to the Guardian. "More than 8,500 doctors were contacted and almost 4,000 responded." (More than 3,000 described the death of a patient.) What Dr. Seale found is what you would expect. If the doctor described him or herself as "very or extremely non-religious," they were "almost twice as likely as religious doctors to report that they had pursued treatments that had the potential to hasten a patient's death, either intentionally or as a side effect," the Los Angeles Times reported. Those with "stronger religious faith" were, according to the Times' Karen Kaplan "less likely to talk with patients about treatment options that could shorten their lives, such as prescribing powerful pain medicines." More significantly, "They were also less likely to keep patients in continuous deep sedation or to support legislation allowing doctor-assisted euthanasia." How did Dr. Seale interpret his own data? "If I were a patient facing end of life care, I would want to know what my doctor's views were on religious matters – whether they are non-religious or religious and whether the doctor felt that would influence them in the kinds of decisions they were looking at," Seale said. Medical News Today went into more detail. "There was a strong link between specialty and reporting decisions that were expected or partly intended to hasten the end of a sick patient's life," it reported. "Hospital specialists were nearly 10 times more likely to report such decisions than palliative care doctors." However, regardless of specialty, "doctors who said they were 'extremely' or 'very' non-religious were nearly twice as likely to report having made these kinds of decisions than peers who described themselves as having religious beliefs." All this upset, Dr Ann McPherson, described as a "patron of Dignity in Dying, a charity that promotes the idea that people should have greater choice, control and access to high quality care at the end of life." She allowed as how "Whilst entitled to their beliefs," doctors "should not let them come in the way of providing patient centred care at the end of life." Two concluding thoughts. "Patient-centered," to the pro-euthanasia set, always means a preferential option for death. By contrast the doctors who described themselves as very or extremely religious were in no hurry to expedite their patients' deaths. Second, Dr. McPherson implied that these physicians might easily be hampered in addressing matters of pain control. A more charitable (and far more likely) expectation is that these physicians--since they are also not promoters of euthanasia--would know that proper pain management is the single best line of defense against the assisted suicide set. |
