[...] emerge very clearly that that phrase "in your hands' does not refer only to others but also affects each of us personally, it feels to be "in their own hands."
So come to connect the two elements, namely the strength of the medicine and the wise and prudent assessment of the person. The progress of the medical art may continue for a long time, taking advantage of machines is often complicated, even a life with no more conscience or contacts with the surrounding world, reduced to mere vegetative life. Here enters the prudential judgment not only of the doctor, but first the person concerned or whoever is responsible, to distinguish between ordinary and extraordinary means, and decide which still wants to use extraordinary means.
The book examines much of this series and it does not so much with general axioms, but with the memory of events that have occurred, of which the author has witnessed first hand. Such a situation in which the physical life is in danger is also the opportunity to describe with the problems and dilemmas that are posed to the patient as a doctor and all those who care for the patient himself. The enormous potential of medical science not infrequently arise in situations where it is very difficult to determine what an "ordinary remedy" that is, those tools that everyone shall, not legal obligation, but out of duty and drive less, use, and what they are instead those "extraordinary means" that the patient or his representative, may decide on reasonable grounds, to use or reject. The question arises here that we see emerging more clearly in the public debate: how far can and should push the medicine? Certainly, as the author says "it is the duty of the doctor not to force, able to stop when there's nothing to be done even if this causes frustration and despair." But when you experience these cases, we still want to call 'extreme', particularly when "there is a state that not only prevents to express themselves and interact with the outside world, but blocks the awareness and reduces the person to a pure and vegetate this state is revealed, after careful and prolonged examination, to be irreversible? "[...]
Carlo Maria Martini
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