Helping Patients Who Are Dying or Helping Patients to Die? | Prof. Farr Curlin

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 13th, 2023, at East Carolina University.

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About the Speaker:

Farr Curlin is the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities and CoDirector of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin’s ethics scholarship takes up moral questions that are raised by religion associated differences in physicians’ practices. He is an active palliative medicine physician and holds appointments in both the School of Medicine and the Divinity School, where he is working with colleagues to develop a new interdisciplinary community of scholarship and training focused on the intersection of theology, medicine, and culture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.6	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.6	So consider this case.
0:26.6	Elsie's a 50-year-old carpenter.
0:28.6	He and his wife are proud parents of twin daughters.
0:31.6	And one day Elsie's wife notices his eyes look yellow,
0:34.6	and Elsie goes to see his doctor.
0:38.3	Imaging reveals a tumor in the pancreas with multiple lesions in the liver.
0:43.3	A procedure is done to place a stint in LC's bioluct and biopsies confirm what everyone fears.
0:51.3	Metastatic pancreatic cancer.
0:53.3	I want us to think together about what it means to care well for LC, to be a good medical
1:00.0	practitioner to him in the future he faces, and to think about how palliative medicine,
1:05.6	which is my clinical discipline, fits into good medicine for LC.
1:13.2	And then also to think about medical aid and dying.
1:22.6	Since the positive pressure mechanical ventilator was developed in the late 1960s, there has been widespread concern that the default pathway for those who die within health care institutions,
1:30.1	like ECU's hospital nearby, and certainly Duke's hospital,
1:36.5	this default pathway traps patients in a technologically driven institutional matrix
1:42.0	that imposes undue suffering and isolates them from their communities.
1:47.1	Have you seen this, any of you? Probably with a loved one.
	...

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