Essay The Ethics of Longevity

As time passes medicine and the healthcare system has greatly improved the life expectancy of mankind, and more options present themselves, they also come a price as to which is the right choice to make. How do we defy which life is more important, who gets to live and who has second priority?

Imagine laying in a hospital bed living everyday in extreme pain with no hope of getting better. This scenario explains what many people go through everyday, which is a living with a terminal illness. M. Lee, a science historian, and Alexander Stingl a sociologist, define terminal illness as “an illness from which the patient is not expected to recover even with treatment. As the illness progresses death is inevitable” (1). There are not many options for the terminally ill besides dying a slow and painful death, but assisted suicide could be best option for these patients. Assisted suicide is “any case in which a doctor gives a patient (usually someone with a terminal illness) the means to carry out their own suicide by using a lethal dose of medication” (Lee and Stingl 1). Some feel that assisted suicide is unnecessary because it is too great of a controversy and will only cause problems in society. However, assisted suicide should be legal in the United States as long as there are strict regulations to accompany it.

In homes across the world, millions of victims are suffering from fatal and terminal illnesses.With death knocking on their door, should these people have to endure pain and misery knowing what is to come? The answers to these questions are very controversial. Furthermore, there is a greater question to be answered—should these people have the right and option to end the relentless pain and agony through physician assisted death? Physician-Assisted Suicide PAS is highly contentious because it induces conflict of several moral and ethical questions such as who is the true director of our lives. Is suicide an individual choice and should the highest priority to humans be alleviating pain or do we suffer for a purpose? Is suicide a purely

With a respectable argument against the idea of pharmaceutical advances eventually leading to immortality, Lexchin uses multiple forms of rhetoric, mostly logos, to sway the readers. He sets our deep fantasies of someday being able to live forever against our rational minds and backs up his case with sound logic and viable examples that leave us no doubts about human limitation.

Lachman explores the ethical alternative to Physician Assisted Suicide (PSA) for patients with a terminal illness. She strongly emphasizes the right of the patients to be fully informed of the other options they have available to them such as Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking. VSED is a legal treatment available in all states unlike PSA which is only legal in five states. Terminally ill patients typically feel that they do not wish to carry out the last moments of their life as a burden to their families and would rather rush their death. In these desperate situations they feel that the death in minutes, provided by the over dosage of prescribed lethal medication, PSA is a better alternative than VSED. Patients are not fully informed of the ethical benefits of VSED. According to Lachman, through VSED the patient dies of terminal dehydration and the discomfort they may feel during the process can be managed with the correct palliative care. By choosing to refuse life sustaining nutrients the patient can die in their own terms while allowing their body to perform a natural form of death. She indicates that VSED is also a form in which the patient will not have to feel the excoriating pain that they fear and will actually lose conscious during their final moments of the 1-3 week

Philosophers throughout history often have a pessimistic outlook on life. Socrates, Lucretius and Epicurus are just some of a number of philosophers that argue against the liberal view of life. Daniel Callahan is a contemporary philosopher that explores the role of medicine in modern society. Callahan argues against the liberal view of life by saying that people should focus on living full and fitting lives. In the first section, titled The Fallacies of Callahan’s Arguments, I explore the problems with his ideas and show that his argument does not justify setting a limit to human lives. In The Argument for the Continuation of Life, I argue for the liberal view of life and support it with Christine Overall’s views. Human beings should be able to extend their lives as they see fit and setting limits based on anti-life extension ideas would go against the individual’s right to choose.

Although a patient’s choice of suicide symbolizes an expression of self-determination, there is a great distinction between denying life-sustaining treatments and demanding life-ending treatments. The right to self-determination is a right to allow or reject offered treatments, not to choose what should be offered. The right to refuse life-sustaining interventions does not correlate with a right to force others to hasten their death. The inability of physicians to inhibit death does not mean that physicians are allowed to help induce death.

The justice argument regarding extending the human lifespan looks at the dilemma morally; the moral dilemma being: is it fair for one person to extend their life over another. There is a distinct struggle

The deliberate act of ending another 's life, given his or her consent, is formally referred to as euthanasia. At present, euthanasia is one of the most controversial social-ethical issues that we face, in that it deals with a sensitive subject matter where there is much uncertainty as to what position one ought to take. Deliberately killing another person is presumed by most rational people as a fundamental evil act. However, when that person gives his or her consent to do so, this seems to give rise to an exceptional case. This can be illustrated in the most common case of euthanasia, where the person who is willing to die suffers from an illness that causes great pain, and will result in his or her demise in the not-so-distant future.

From aging comes illness and body function failure. Some elderly people “require the need for long-term institutional care” because they could not care for themselves and their family are too busy to care for them (Gordon). Other people, like I for instance, do not want to be a burden on my family and deplete their hard, earned money due to paying for my institutional care so we would rather choose to end our burden through assist suicide. Through advance technology and medical treatment, many “Americans are living much longer lives,” but “Americans also face prolonged illness at the end of life that can result in great suffering” because of this assist in dying has been a subject of great interest (Orentlicher). Suffering from long-term illness later in your life could be solved “by taking a lethal dose of prescription medication” which is an option many would chose (Orentlicher).

The life expectancy for a person with CP depends on how the symptoms are regulated, how severe the conditions of their CP is, and if the person with CP has comorbid factors. Life for people with CP usually involves more doctor visits, can require medications or therapy, and possibly even surgery, but can usually be the same length as the general population (Stern, 2016).

The issue of longevity is fraught with vague studies and controversies about how much difference a recognized number of attitudes and behaviors can make. However, the essence of success is hinged on a tenant that is skewed much differently than many societies subscribe to. The alliance of longevity does not rely on individual responsibilities to be successful. Rather, it is heavily dependent on the concept that individuals are all part of a system, and for enduring gains in health, communities should shift their tactics away from trying to change individual behavior to optimizing the surroundings they live in. Dan Buettner performed extensive data analysis and research to pinpoint hot spots—regions called blue zones to locate the world’s longest lived people. He focused primarily on geographic localities that had not only the highest medium of 100-year-olds, but also clusters of people who had grown old without conditions like heart disease, obesity, cancer, or diabetes. Remarkably, each of these sites shared a common denominator: the recipe for longevity is deeply intertwined with community, lifestyle and spirituality.

“To Live On”, a 2005 art installation composed of roses and infusion bags by Min Jeong Seo, elegantly captures the idea of medical advancement of a double edged sword. Seo’s art piece involves fifty long stemmed roses, eerily suspended with the blooms perfectly preserved in infusion bags, while the stems hang freely, drying and decaying at their own pace. It’s an apt visual metaphor that showcases the good and bad consequences of constant medical research and development, one that addresses the concepts of “playing God” and where quality of life gives way to mere extension of it. While scientific progress has given society increasingly effective therapies and has allowed us to extend our collective life span, it has also led us into increasingly woolly territory where we must consider if genetically typing fetuses, blanket prescription writing or a systematic emphasis on tertiary care is compatible with a higher quality of life than if our bodies were left to their own devices. Unpacking these issues requires a degree of separation away from the medical field and the patients, practitioners and occasional overcommitment to scientific dogma that introduces biases and cloudy judgement into the question of how society should use its technology. This core tension has always fascinated me and has inspired me to constantly ask if the newest discovery is actually the best, or if a simpler, more effective solution already exists and someone just hasn’t figured out how to apply it.

Sometimes life can throw a curve ball at someone, and completely change the way they look at it too. Heart problems is something that doesn’t discriminate against anyone, and can attack even the individuals that live healthy lives. No one wants to find out their time is limited, and they have a chance of dying, but that happens to more people than you think. When it comes to health issues there are things that cause it, things that aren’t anyone’s problem, and things anyone can do to prevent it from ever occurring. Many Americans feel that exercising, eating healthy, and drinking a lot of water is enough, but many have found out that’s not all the truth.

Advances in the frontiers of biotechnology show promise of slowing or repairing the aging process. Time magazine journalists Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman reported that Google is diversifying and launching its exploration to extend human life. McCracken and Grossman wrote, “Medicine is well on its way to becoming an information science: doctors and researchers are now able to harvest and mine massive quantities of data from patients. And Google is very, very good with large data sets.” Advances in medicine have created the possibility that humans born in the 21st century can live to be 120 years old. Sharon Jayson reported in USA Today, “A long life sounds great, but living radically longer than our life expectancy today isn’t what most Americans really want.” According to a 2013 Pew study, 69% of adults surveyed believed 90 years was the ideal lifespan. Ninety-four-year-old Margaret Telesca Arthur explained it this way, “I don’t want to die, but a day rarely goes by that I don’t get news of another friend passing away. That can be a lonely feeling.” What about other nations? Could the frontiers of medicine that might help people in the West live well into their 100s be utilized in places like Sierre Leone where the average life expectancy is 47 years?