Question

3. Explain the leading causes of death,

Who was Jack Kavorkian?

What is euthanasia, the value of advanced directives,

What are mortality salience and death anxiety?

What is the right to die concept?

Answer 1

• Dr. Jack Kevorkian , the medical pathologist who willfully helped dozens of terminally ill people end their lives, becoming the central figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide.The pathologist known as Dr Death who claimed to have helped 130 people commit suicide when terminally ill.
• Kevorkian was prosecuted a total of four times in Michigan for assisted suicides -- he was acquitted in three of the cases, and a mistrial was declared in the fourth. Kevorkian was disappointed, telling reporters that he wanted to be imprisoned in order to shed light on the hypocrisy and corruption of society.
• Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide refer to deliberate action taken with the intention of ending a life, in order to relieve persistent suffering.
• In order to overcome the difficulty faced in case of patients who are unable to express their wishes at the time of taking the decision, the concept of Advance Medical Directives emerged in various countries. Advance Directives for health care go by various names in different countries though the objective by and large is the same, that is, to specify an individual’s health care decisions and to identify persons who will take those decisions for the said individual in the event he is unable to communicate his wishes to the doctor.Advance Directives for Health Care are legal documents by which individuals express their wishes about medical treatment in case they are ever unable to make health care decisions for themselves. Advance directives can be used to license euthanasia.
• Mortality salience is the awareness by an individual that his or her death is inevitable. The term derives from terror management theory, which proposes that mortality salience causes existential anxiety that may be buffered by an individual's cultural worldview and/or sense of self-esteem.
• Mortality salience increases death anxiety for individuals who lack meaning in life.Mortality salience, or awareness of the inevitability of one’s own death, generates a state of anxiety that triggers a defense mechanism for the control of thinking that affects different human activities and psychological processes.
• According to the Terror Management Theory, all human behavior is motivated by the fear of one’s own demise, giving rise to a state of anxiety that arises when we confront the awareness of our own mortality (MS: Mortality Salience) with the desire to survive. The anxiety produced when MS is activated is reduced via mechanisms for thought control, such as proximal and distal defenses.
• Proximal defenses are initiated when MS is activated; i.e., when thoughts about death enter our consciousness. They are rational, and allow us to escape such thoughts by fixing our attention on other things, reducing the attention focused on oneself, or trivializing one’s own vulnerability to death.
• These distal defenses involve the cultural systems that give meaning and support to our existence (e.g., religion, politics) and also self-esteem, leading a person to feel special and important to the extent to which he or she is so according to cultural values.
• The right of a terminally ill person to refuse to have her or his life extended by artificial or heroic means and often called passive euthanasia; the withdrawal of feeding tubes and other artificial means of life support from a terminally ill person.
• “Right to die” refers to various issues related to the decision of whether an individual should be allowed to die, when s/he could continue to live with the aid of life support, or in a diminished or enfeebled capacity.
• It also refers to the idea that a person with a terminal illness should be allowed to commit suicide before death occurs or should have the right to refuse to have his/her life extended by artificial or heroic means. This may be done by withdrawal of feeding tubes and other artificial means of life support from a terminally ill person. The concept of “right to die” is often referred to as dying with dignity.