31-5-2006
Suffering
The due care criteria stipulate that the patient’s suffering must be unbearable and without prospect of improvement. The absence of prospects for improvement must be determined according to prevailing medical opinion. In the medical sense, this can be established fairly objectively. The doctor’s professional opinion on the scope for treatment and care play a major role.
It is more difficult to establish whether suffering is unbearable, because this is person-related. It is determined by the patient’s outlook on life, their physical and mental strength, and their personality. What one person regards as bearable is unbearable for another. But to assess whether suffering is unbearable, there has to be some kind of objective standard. The committees therefore examine whether the physician found the patient’s suffering palpably unbearable.
The criterion ‘unbearable suffering’ can lead to dilemmas in some specific situations, for instance where patients are comatose or suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
