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A comment on When Adolescents Give Up Pot, Their Cognition Quickly Improves. Parent comment

Re:When Adolescents Give Up Pot, Their Cognition Quickly Imp... by Nasrudith on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @12:09PM (#18346912)
From what I heard it is a bit of a lawyerish distinction at that point - that euthanasia is never the intent but may be the end result. If they arecterminally ill or mortally injured with instructions to treat by giving enough that they don't have pain. If it is a level that they can just slumber peacefully 22 hours a day they are to go with that. If they are 95% third degree burnt and they need more than that and it eventually stops their breathing it is an unfortunate side effect of treating their pain but still the best option sadly and not malpractice - sometimes needed treatments can kill even when everything is done right.

The evasion and mental gymnastics does have some point at least - it isn't the doctor deciding to take the life of a patient because of a judgement and well any student of the 20th century knows how /that/ can end.

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Re:When Adolescents Give Up Pot, Their Cognition Quickly Imp... by Kadin on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @12:30PM (#18347107)
The mental gymnastics are due to the legal environment in the US and in particular on laws in many states that could send physicians who prescribe a drug for the purpose of ending a patient's life to jail.

But there are lots of drugs that have the possible side effect of death, and plenty of patients who decide that the risk-benefit of taking a drug is warranted even though it might kill them.

So therefore, everything has to be described in terms of "pain management" and "comfort" where the cessation of breathing is just a... potential side effect. If that, combined with the patient's standing orders not to intubate or perform any sort of resuscitative action in the event that they stop breathing, leads to death... well...

The euphemism that is frequently used is "palliative sedation" (or "terminal sedation", although that seems to be used mostly by people of the thou-must-maximally-suffer school of thought).

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