GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: New documentary tells personal story of VSED

domingo, 20 de mayo de 2018

New documentary tells personal story of VSED

New documentary tells personal story of VSED

Bioedge

New documentary tells personal story of VSED

by Xavier Symons | 19 May 2018 |

A new American documentary, Tomorrow Never Knows, tells the story of a transgender person with early onset Alzheimer's who decided to end his life through “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking” (VSED).

64-year-old Shar (Tim) Jones died on the 1st September 2016 in his home in Denver, Colorado, after consciously refusing nutrition and hydration. Jones had early onset Alzheimer’s, though he was not suffering from a terminal illness. He chose VSED because he couldn’t stand the thought of cognitive decline: “Alzheimer's destroys your being”, he says in the film’s trailer. “There will come a point where I won’t even know who I am”.

At the time of his death, assisted suicide was not legal in Colorado, and even today it is not available for people without a terminal illness.

The documentary focuses primarily on Shar’s final days as he lies dying in bed, surrounding by a veritable shrine of objects reflective of his alternative Buddhist spirituality. His partner Cynthia Vitale waits with him as his breathing becomes more laboured.

The film’s producers say the documentary is “an evocative, contemplative work directed at educating and humanizing what it means to be transgender and what it's like living with Alzheimer's Disease”.

Yet its content will be very confronting for some viewers. The film does not attempt to sanitise the painful final moments of Shar’s life, and it even includes a scene of Cynthia preparing Shar’s stiff, dead body for cremation. There are also broader questions about the limits of choice and the psychology of suicide. For many, Shar’s death would be no cause for celebration.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Shusaku Endo may be the greatest Japanese novelist who didn’t win the Nobel Prize. He is best known in the West for his novel Silence, about Christianity in 17th Century Japan, which was recently made into a film by Martin Scorsese. But one of his early novels touches upon the ethics of clinical research. Based upon a historical incident which took place just weeks before the end of World War II, The Sea and Poison relates the moral corruption of doctors who vivisected several American prisoners of war.

It’s hard to get, but well worth reading, as it exemplifies the hazards of research on prisoners. Almost no population is more vulnerable to exploitation by clinical researchers than prisoners. Even if they benefit from the research in some tangential way, a more powerful motivation may be their desire to please prison authorities.

Many bioethicists have written about this difficult ethical issue, but this doesn’t make it any easier to make a decision in practice. Below is an article about proposed clinical trial conducted in prisons to determine whether low-salt diets are healthier. What do you think?