... may be suffering from depression or a false sense of worthlessness which is affecting their judgment Their decision- making may equally be affected by confusion dementia or troublesome symptoms which could be relieved with appropriate treatment Patients who say let me die usually after effective symptom relief are most that we...

... on does this mean that the unconscious patient in ITU is no longer a person What about the 97 year-old patient on the ward with dementia or the child with severe learning difficulties Intellect thought reason and even mind are capricious changing from day to day Surely the criteria for personhood...

... from systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomised trials that some herbal medicines are efficacious Recent examples include St John s wort for depression ginkgo for dementia palmetto for benign prostatic hyperplasia and horse chestnut seed for chronic venous insufficiency Past examples of course include aspirin willow bark digitalis foxglove and morphine...

... was a steady increase 1923 2120 2331 2636 3136 and 3695 Euthanasia accounts for 2 8 of all Dutch deaths Euthanasia for people with early dementia doubled to 49 last year and 13 psychiatric patients were euthanised Numbers could be much higher since not all cases are reported Lancet 2012 380...

... still common in much of the world and was not unusual in the UK in the past Even in a modern UK context diagnoses like dementia are often not fully explained 4 what is distinctive for the Christian Most people tell the truth most of the time don t they Is...

... sick or just self-protective Mild cognitive impairment is a new entry but where do we draw the line between naturally declining memory and a pathological dementia 3 Another tendency of western medicine is to reduce humans to the merely material For instance when does sadness become depression The serotonin hypothesis collapses...

... has occurred in respect of expensive drugs for treating cancer but it has also occurred in the case of medication for common conditions such as dementia and osteoporosis In most of these the criticism has usually taken the form that NICE has failed to consider all the particular circumstances of the...

... of 10 to 20 of euthanasia cases per year from 1 923 in 2006 to 5 306 in 2014 The 2014 figures included 81 with dementia and 41 with psychiatric conditions 9 In addition in 2001 about 5 6 of all deaths in the Netherlands were related to deep-continuous sedation This...

... some progressive neurological conditions It now seems appropriate to extend these principles of care to other common modes of death for example severe stroke or dementia There is public concern at present regarding the use or non-use of hydration by tube when patients are apparently unaware of symptoms including thirst when...

... though public demand for services closer to home makes such differences inevitable Health and funding decisions cause much controversy in the UK with the so-called dementia tax 2 playing a big part in the 2017 General Election as did the war of Jennifer s Ear 25 years before in 1992 3...