Palliative Care and End-of-life: How it’s Done
San Jose Care Resource Guide: In End-of -Life decisions, it is important to realize how the “patient” would be
- Euthanized, or
- Terminated, or
- Killed.
Pick your choice of terms according to your belief system, (yes, atheism is a belief system too…)
San Jose Care Resource Guide:
Since a lot of patients are on respirators at the time this would be done. [We use the word "done" instead of "happen" because this is an active decision on the part of the patient (if conscious), the medical palliative care team, and of the family.] We found this article in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management . This study is about the influence of morphine injection on time to death after withdrawing ventilation from a terminal patient. Click Here Article is from East Carolina University.
San Jose Care Resource Guide, quoting: “…The mean time to death after terminal extubation was 152.7 ± 229.5 minutes without correlation with premorbid diagnoses..After extubation, each 1 mg/hour increment of morphine infused during the last hour of life was associated with a delay of death by 7.9 minutes …”(Extubation: remaval of the respiration devices}
San Jose Care Resource Guide: So,
- 152.7 + 229.5 minutes=382.20min 6.37 hrs: We are kinder to criminals with lethal injections…see below
- 152.7 - 229.5 minutes=382.20min=-76.8 min: Negative time a little confusing??
Compare the duration of death by extubation we mentionned above, to the duration of the death penalty procedure by lethal injection.
Quoting Medscape Today: “….According to the North Carolina Department of Corrections, once the ECG monitor displays a flat line for 5 min, the warden declares death and a physician certifies that death has occurred. Execution start times and declaration times were available for 33 of the 42 lethal injections conducted in North Carolina … Mean times to death [for lethal injection ececutions] were 9.88 ± 3.87 min for Protocol A, 13.47 ± 4.88 min for Protocol B, and 9.00 ± 3.71 min for Protocol C…..”
San Jose Care Resource Guide: You can draw your own conclusions…
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