A new framework for facilitating decisions on death and dying

The troubling public, moral and legal issues surrounding questions of death and dying need a new focus on the virtues of compassion and respectfulness, on a better understanding of a person as someone who has deep emotional, spiritual, and social aspects and needs, and whose body is more than "physical machine," but is "lived body" which gives persons the capacity to act in the world and to feel and suffer deeply. Western medicine needs to re-humanize death; physicians need to see themselves as "assisting" persons in dealing with health, life and death in the context of being able to assert their values and beliefs and to realize their goals. Western medicine's concepts of 'benefit' and 'harm,' are too narrow, as is their fight to 'preserve life' at all costs. Finally, the present approach to death and dying, except for the Hospice movement, neglects the patient's emotional, psychological, social, and existential suffering.