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: Emily Source Type: blogs
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