Dear Editor:
Find enclosed a letter to the editor for publication if appropriate.
Suffering with Dignity
For ethical and practical reasons legitimizing euthanasia is a diabolical idea. What else can we do to reduce the pain of the seriously and terminally sick? Everyone has the right to pain treatment: we must eliminate the suffering, not any human being that suffers from the pain.
Confidence in caregivers is very necessary to reduce anxiety. It is necessary and noble to share information and decisions in order to inspire confidence. In this way, the sick increases the feeling of having everything under control and that reduces pain.
The last hour of life has been depersonalized, dehumanized and technified. The result is that the terminally sick experience an acute loneliness before death. Euthanasia is medical technology’s response to grief and death. However, in an ethical society, the solution is not a lethal injection.
We must see what the seriously or terminalyl sick need to be considered respected. Harvey Chochinov, an expert psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba (Canada) in the care of terminally sick people, has developed a treatment called "dignity therapy". It identifies the factors that cause the grief of the sick and shapes aids to thwart it.
Hope is essential to reduce pain. Leaving a legacy is also a link with the future. For the sick agonize with serenity it is essential that their existence has a meaning, that life is worth living.
The main human essence is that we are mortal humans in search of meaning. The challenge is reduced to discovering a meaning to death, to make it so that the transition to eternal life is the last great act of existence. On the contrary, a lethal injection is a fast and cheap technology resource. Finding sense in death is nothing like that. We have to find a transcendent meaning to life and tell it to future generations. This is a significant reason why euthanasia is banned in most of the universe.
Clemente Ferrer, Spain.
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