One comment on “The Supreme Court Steps in on End-of-Life Decisions”
In the 1930’s a Russian scientist named Brukhonenko claimed in a series of experiments to have kept the severed heads of dogs alive, using a kind of heart lung machine he called an autojektor. In a film offered as proof, widely available on the internet, he is seen shining a light in the heads eye and it blinks and even feeding the dog’s head a piece of cheese, which promptly drops out the severed esophagus. While the veracity of his claims have been questioned, I don’t believe it has been conclusively disproven. Ninety years of progress in medicine and the idea of keeping a severed head alive for an extended period seems entirely possible, although some might question the definition of “alive”. (See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDqh-r8TQgs )
On October 18th,, 2013 in Rasouli v. Sunnybrook Hospital, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled, that the medical opinion of doctors is not sufficient to override the wishes of the patient or their family surrogates. Preventing unilateral decisions by doctors in itself may be a good thing but we also must not allow the opinion of bereaved, irrational or terrified people to override both common sense and medical science. To do so puts the health of many people who truly can he helped, at risk.
A source of amazement in 1940, the autojektor’s modern equivalent is a standard piece of medical equipment in every hospital today. It is routine to keep people alive with machines able to replace virtually every non-functioning human organ. At the insistence of family unable to accept the natural cycle of human birth, life and death, this kind of technology is keeping Hassan Rasouli alive today even though doctors agree he has been in a near vegetative state for three years with no realistic prospect of recovery. In another end-of-life legal debate, the critical care physicians of Sam Golubchuk, resigned from their jobs rather than be forced to “torture” him (the doctors description) by continuing to regularly remove bedsore infected flesh because family driven court injunctions insisted he be kept alive with a battery of machines. Given this collision of patient rights and modern technology it seems both practical and inevitable we could soon catch up with Brukhonenko’s vision and hook a patients head directly to the required machines. This advance would greatly simplify medical treatment while still allowing family to never having to admit their loved one was truly dead.
Perhaps this is the immortality mankind has dreamed of from days of the Egyptian mummies to Shelley’s Frankenstein. Facilities full of heads, each hooked up to their own autojektor, to continue in perpetuity. I know he’s not well, visiting family would say, but look, he’s blinking. There is still hope.
End of life is no longer a clear line we cross and there will always be someone clinging to belief and hope in defiance of reality. We may not want to grant the medical system the power to decide when we live and die but Canada will also be ill served if we give unlimited and unfettered demand upon the financial resources of our health system to people that think a (part) body on an autojektor means their loved one is still alive.
From The Boulevard 
In the 1930’s a Russian scientist named Brukhonenko claimed in a series of experiments to have kept the severed heads of dogs alive, using a kind of heart lung machine he called an autojektor. In a film offered as proof, widely available on the internet, he is seen shining a light in the heads eye and it blinks and even feeding the dog’s head a piece of cheese, which promptly drops out the severed esophagus. While the veracity of his claims have been questioned, I don’t believe it has been conclusively disproven. Ninety years of progress in medicine and the idea of keeping a severed head alive for an extended period seems entirely possible, although some might question the definition of “alive”. (See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDqh-r8TQgs )
On October 18th,, 2013 in Rasouli v. Sunnybrook Hospital, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled, that the medical opinion of doctors is not sufficient to override the wishes of the patient or their family surrogates. Preventing unilateral decisions by doctors in itself may be a good thing but we also must not allow the opinion of bereaved, irrational or terrified people to override both common sense and medical science. To do so puts the health of many people who truly can he helped, at risk.
A source of amazement in 1940, the autojektor’s modern equivalent is a standard piece of medical equipment in every hospital today. It is routine to keep people alive with machines able to replace virtually every non-functioning human organ. At the insistence of family unable to accept the natural cycle of human birth, life and death, this kind of technology is keeping Hassan Rasouli alive today even though doctors agree he has been in a near vegetative state for three years with no realistic prospect of recovery. In another end-of-life legal debate, the critical care physicians of Sam Golubchuk, resigned from their jobs rather than be forced to “torture” him (the doctors description) by continuing to regularly remove bedsore infected flesh because family driven court injunctions insisted he be kept alive with a battery of machines. Given this collision of patient rights and modern technology it seems both practical and inevitable we could soon catch up with Brukhonenko’s vision and hook a patients head directly to the required machines. This advance would greatly simplify medical treatment while still allowing family to never having to admit their loved one was truly dead.
Perhaps this is the immortality mankind has dreamed of from days of the Egyptian mummies to Shelley’s Frankenstein. Facilities full of heads, each hooked up to their own autojektor, to continue in perpetuity. I know he’s not well, visiting family would say, but look, he’s blinking. There is still hope.
End of life is no longer a clear line we cross and there will always be someone clinging to belief and hope in defiance of reality. We may not want to grant the medical system the power to decide when we live and die but Canada will also be ill served if we give unlimited and unfettered demand upon the financial resources of our health system to people that think a (part) body on an autojektor means their loved one is still alive.