'I Don't Want to Live This Way, Doc. Please Take Me Off the Ventilator and Let Me Die.'

摘要

One of the most difficult situations that health care professionals can face is a request to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, particularly when the person making the request has a new-onset life-altering, but not fatal, disabling condition.The story of Dax Cowart has underscored this issue into the hearts and minds of recent generations of many medical students. In 1973, Mr Cowart, a 26-year-old Air Force reserve fighter pilot, sustained extensive total body surface area burns from a gas explosion, which killed his father. While badly injured and lying on the side of the road, Mr Cowart asked the first man who got to him to get him a gun, that he was a "dead man" anyway. Over the subsequent year of painful treatments, Mr Cowart repeatedly requested to forego treatment and be allowed to die. In 1974, with the help of Robert B. White, MD, the psychiatrist consulted to evaluate Mr Cowart's decision-making capacity, a film, Please Let Me Die, was made, which addressed the difficult issues raised by Mr Cowart's story. A decade later, an updated and enhanced version, Dax's Case, was released [1]. Both films have been used extensively in teaching medical ethics classes in medical schools.