1: Palliative Care & Euthanasia/ An Understanding of Differences

I wish to put some ideas here in these pages regarding the interface and the differences between Palliative Care and Euthanasia in a sensible and serious way in the next few days.

For the purposes of the topic, I will make a clear distinction that what I am talking about is Voluntary Euthanasia and, indeed, Voluntary Palliative Care, so I am not talking about having these therapies decided or imposed by well-meaning or not well-meaning others, simply because there are too many distractions once we enter that discussion.

Often the discussions can be skewed by people with a specific ideological or religious agenda, and the topic is too serious and meaningful to allow this casual and mischievous distraction.

So, to start with a simple definition of Palliative Care:
Palliative Care is care and therapies established for a person to deal with the pain and symptoms involved with a life taking incurable illness. Often this is noted as specifically related to cancer, but this is untrue. It is any progressive incurable life taking illness which does, in fact, take life, and, indeed, doesn't give it back.

The object of Palliative Care is the removal or ablation of distress and pain usually within the last 3 months of life, based upon sensible understanding of disease trajectory...and there is very little mystery involved with disease trajectory, really.

In this way Palliative Care is really defined by its motivation: to alleviate, prevent, treat, assuage and .ameliorate distressing symptoms during the progression of disease to the death end point, and to also provide care and support for family, friends etc during and after the process. The Motivation is clear. To make life liveable whilst life endures without imposing pointless interventions onto the person in terms of invasive curative therapies when the illness is not curable.

Euthanasia, on the other hand has a different motivation, which is to end the life of the person based upon their decision, in a clear and timely fashion chosen by the person. So, the Motivation in Euthanasia is to bring about the death of the person in accordance with their wishes.