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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm fairly certain that mine basically starved to death. No one could get her to eat at all for the last 6 months[/quote]

And HOW is that ethical. Elderly care in this country is disgusting. [/quote]

I’m sorry but I think you have little experience of end of life care. It is very very common for elderly people to stop eating. Guess what? It is also common for other species besides humans, too. The body goes through a natural process of shutting down if one is ‘blessed’ enough to live into the very elderly years.

Having worked 8 years in elder care, mostly hospice status patients, I can attest that there is nothing cruel about refraining from force feeding an elderly person who doesn’t have an appetite. It is an entirely different thing from refusing to feed a healthy younger body. It is not cruelty and having had a number of entirely lucid patients who chose to stop taking nourishment, it is not painful either.

Millions of people- billions, in fact - choose to fast on a regular basis for religious or dietary reasons - do you think these people would do that if refraining from eating was an acutely painful thing? It just isn’t. And when the body is 80+ years old and everything is slowly shutting down, it simply doesn’t hurt to stop eating.

In my experience the most disgusting aspect of elder care in this country is that there are too many doctors nurses aides and family members who coerce patients into every possible treatment to extend their lives even if they are living in despair over their existence which has very little quality of life anymore. That’s what I see all the time, not people suffering because they are allowed to peacefully fade away.
The most [/quote]

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