But I'm a pediatrician. I don't do "death."

(A hearty welcome to Emily Riegel, MD (@emriegel) a Med/Peds physician who completed a hospice and palliative medicine fellowship a few years ago and is now at KU Medical Center helping lead pediatric palliative care in Kansas City.  Emily is a keen observer who could easily be writing the great next medical drama on TV, but until then I'm happy she is contributing to Pallimed - Sinclair) In the March issue of Pediatrics,  Jonna D. Clark, MD, and Denise M. Dudzinski, PhD, take on the audacious task of encouraging pediatricians to step into the role of decision maker for terminally ill children and, in doing so, help alleviate the burden of  making decisions regarding CPR from the shoulders of parents. In “The Culture of Dysthanasia: Attempting CPR in Terminally Ill Children,” Clark and Dudzinski call into question the practice of requiring the “opt-out” approach to CPR, and state that this “fails to appreciate the nuances of the special parent-child relationship and the moral and emotional complexity of enlisting parents in decisions to withhold CPR from their children.” The authors then provide two tenets on which physicians ought to base this action of taking over decision making for the parents of terminally ill children. The first tenet is a brilliant description of the “therapeutic goal” of CPR, one that I would love to see come into more common use, to become as second nature in physicians minds’ as...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Carer Workers Authors: Source Type: blogs