Doctors' words - ‘torture’, ‘gruesome’, ‘abuse’, ‘mutilate’ and ‘cruel’ evoke images more fitting of penal regimes than hospitals. The moral toll exacted upon these physicians is evident in descriptions such as feeling ‘violated’ and ‘traumatised’.
- Elizabeth Dzeng
The research, led by Elizabeth Dzeng, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, is the first to focus on US doctors’ moral distress surrounding resuscitation and treatments that they believe may be futile at the end of life and has implications for the UK as more power is handed from doctors to patients’ representatives around end of life issues.
The qualitative study, titled "Moral Distress Amongst American Physician Trainees Regarding Futile Treatments at the End of Life: A Qualitative Inquiry", is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Elizabeth conducted in-depth interviews with 22 physician trainees in internal medicine at three accredited medical centres in the US and asked how they reacted and responded to ethical challenges arising in the context of perceived futile treatments at the end of life and how they felt about its ethical implications.
It found that doctors who are required to perform procedures such as resuscitation which they feel are futile or harmful have significant moral qualms that they are prolonging suffering as opposed to providing care. Some cope with these by developing detached and dehumanising attitudes towards patients.
One said of a patient: “It felt horrible, like I was torturing him. He was telling us we were torturing him. I did not think we were doing the right things.”
Read the full story
Image:Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation courtesy of Wikimedia.
Credit: Wikimedia
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
_______________________________________________