|
Yes: "[a] time is reached when medicine can no longer be considered as healing and when the suffering patient is being kept alive artificially with no potential of improvement. When we have reached this point and nothing more can be done, then we may justifiably state that we are dealing with goses and should remove obstacles which may lead to an easier death. . . .Medical and technical means need not be continued when the patient is dying and is only being kept alive through these means" (CCAR 1991: par 2-3).
"Halakhists can permit the cessation of medical treatment for end-stage patients who have not arrived at brain death or to the point of gesisah, the very last moments of life. R. Moshe Feinstein rules that ‘when the physicians see that a person cannot recover from his illness but can only continue to life in a state of suffering; and when the treatment they prescribe serves only to prolong his life as it is now, filled with suffering; they must not administer the treatments but leave him alone’. . .Thus we learn that there is a significant difference between healing (refu’ah) and medical procedures that needlessly prolong a patient’s suffering; the former is obligatory, the latter is not" "When. . .a patient has entered the final stages of terminal disease, medical treatments and procedures which serve only to maintain this state of existence are not required" (CCAR 1998: par. 11, 15-26, citations omitted).
|
|
Yes. "Both of these methods [nutrition provided intravenously or through a stomach tube] are certainly appropriate when they are part of the healing process and help the patient toward a cure. They should, however, be discontinued, just as medication when only they and medicine are artificially keeping the patient who is dying (goses) alive. Such feeding does not help the patient and at best must be debilitating, uncomfortable, if not painful";
"Nutrition artificially introduced at the last stage of life should be seen as a hindrance to death and may be stopped, along with medication" (CCAR 1991: par 3).
|