Fenrir said:
I don't disagree that the person in question is best served being putting on hospice. That's a pretty extreme case. Where do you draw the line? When does your ability as doctor to be the arbiter end?
I think it should be reserved for the most obvious cases and should be a rare occurrence. And even if we had that power, it should be a last line of defense. We always want patients/families to come to those realizations themselves if possible.
For example, doctors do have the authority to withdraw care on a patient we can prove is brain dead without family consent. Now that's not the same thing because such a patient is very literally already dead and we're just stopping the illusion of life, but from a patients family perspective it's not that different. This is RARELY invoked however as most people will come to realization that we can't do anything after we explain it to them.
No doctor is ever going to invoke such power on a patient they believe has any chance of meaningful recovery, and in fact doctors going to bat for patients when hospital admin wants to get them out of the hospital or take them off life support is a far more common occurrence than what we're talking about here. If a doctor is telling you that you or your family member is going to die, without any qualifiers, it's because they are extremely certain of that outcome. That isn't something we do lightly or on a regular basis. I understand people want to invoke miracles and the supernatural, and that's fine, but you can't base immediate real world decisions in our physical reality on those notions. If we withdraw care and the patient miraculously survives, that's wonderful. We just know from experience that they probably aren't going to.
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