End-of-life care: is euthanasia the answer?

Excerpt

In Intensive Care Medicine Provoost and colleagues [1] now further analyze their previously published data detailing the end-of-life care received by all children less than 1 year of age who died in Flanders over a 12-month period from 1999 to 2000 [2]. In the present contribution they focus upon the 57 children to whom drugs were administered directly before death. The physicians involved were queried about whether they explicitly intended to hasten death, or whether they merely took the potentially life-shortening effects of these medications into account, without explicitly intending to cause death. A multidisciplinary panel reviewed each case in detail and independently assessed whether the drug actually hastened death. …