Letter: Life prolonged long after all hope is gone

Friday, May 31, 2002 | 4:04 a.m.

There seems to be something systemically wrong with our medical community and our social values when a person's life is prolonged beyond all reason and hope.

An acquaintance of mine has been in a nursing home for the last four years. He no longer has a sense of what or who he is as he lays there with tubes and a wire connected to his body. Doctors, in order to sustain his life, feed him through a tube. His lungs are congested to the point where he has to be aspirated every two hours. He is moved back and forth from a hospital, almost on a regular basis, because he has a staph infection.

There is no glimmer of hope that this man could return, through medical miracles, to a functioning life. One then has to ask the question, "Why is this man allowed to be tortured in this seemingly endless fashion?"

It surely is not that the doctors and society are thinking of the well-being, comfort and eventual serene passing of this tortured individual. It can only be due to the Christian moral bent of our society, misconception of the tenets of the so-called "Hippocratic Oath" or greed on the part of the nursing homes, doctors and the larger medical community in order to bleed the last dollar out of a failed system.

RAYMOND HARBERT

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