The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by James Le Fanu

Author:James Le Fanu [Le Fanu, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465058891
Publisher: Basic Books

Technology and the High Cost of Dying

The third and most significant type of misuse of technology is the use of life-sustaining technologies to prolong the process of dying. The principles of intensive care pioneered by Dr Bjorn Ibsen in the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952 to keep children alive long enough for the strength of their respiratory muscles to recover may save thousands of lives a year but they had also, by the mid-1970s, become diverted into a means of prolonging – at enormous cost – the pain and misery of terminal illness. Thus a United Press Agency bulletin describing General Franco’s final illness in 1975 reported:

At least four mechanical devices are being used in the battle for General Franco’s survival. A defibrillator attached to his chest shocks his heart back to normal when it slows or fades; a pump-like device helps push his blood through his body when it weakens; a respirator helps him breathe and a kidney machine cleans his blood. At various times in his 25-day crisis General Franco has had tubes down his windpipe to provide air, down his nose to provide nourishment, in his abdomen to drain accumulated fluids, and in his digestive tract to relieve gastric pressure. The effort in itself is remarkable considering he has had three major heart attacks. He has undergone emergency surgery twice, once to patch a ruptured artery to save him from bleeding to death, the second time to remove most of an ulcerated and bleeding stomach for the same reason. He has taken some four gallons of blood transfusion. His lungs are congested . . . his kidneys are giving out and his liver is weak. Paralysis periodically affects his intestines . . . he suffers occasional rectal bleeding. Blood clots have formed and spread in his left thigh. Mucus accumulates uncontrollably in his mouth.15

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