This vitally important book attempts to move beyond the current death-denying culture. The use of euphemistic and defiant phrases when dealing with terminal disease such as “She lost her battle with cancer” was more appropriate when medical doctors could do little to prolong life. But treatments and technologies have significantly changed. Now life prolonging interventions have outpaced our willingness to use medical intervention to secure patient control over death and dying. We now face a new question: When is it morally appropriate for medical intervention to hasten the dying process? LiPuma and DeMarco answer by endorsing expanded options for dying patients. Unwanted aggressive treatment regimens and protocols which reject hastening death should be replaced by a patient’s moral right, in carefully defined circumstances, to hasten death by means of medical intervention. Expanded options range from patient directed continuous sedation without hydration to physician assisted suicide for those with progressive degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s. The authors’ overriding goal is to humanize the dying process by expanding patient centered autonomous control.
