Life support: Would you pull the plug? (In some cases, you just have to)

THE contentious issue of life support is one that doctors and those affected have been struggling with for decades. On the one hand, life support offers those suffering with terminal illnesses an opportunity to extend their lives, yet on the other it can lead to false hope of recovery or merely a respite from inevitable death. Life support can, in a sense really just be ‘death support’, according to CNN reporter Elizabeth Landau. There is a distinct difference between cardiac death, when someone’s heart stops, and brain death, when an individual has “sustained either an irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or an irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem”, says CNN.com. Additionally, both of these differ significantly from a ‘persistent vegetative state’, which indicates that the brain still has some activity, as in the famous case of Terri Schiavo. If someone is brain dead, there is no hope that they will ever recover, it is not the same as being in a coma. It is effectively death, and there is absolutely no point in drawing out the hope of families and loved ones just because someone is technically ‘still breathing’. Two divergent cases in particular come to mind regarding life support. In both cases, the females became brain dead unexpectedly, however one family wanted to “prolong the patient’s biological functioning” whereas the other believed that their daughter wouldn’t want to remain on life support. Obviously, these two cases sparked a great deal of controversy. Arthur Caplan from Time Magazine agrees, ‘brain death is death’. There is absolutely no point in sustaining life that is not in fact life. The counter argument can be made that, if there is any hope for continued life then it should be up to the families to decide how they want to deal with the situation. But in the case of brain death, which is what life support currently sustains, there is no hope that the patient will ever wake up. So there is realistically absolutely no point in keeping them hooked up to a machine that will only cost the families unnecessary expenses and ultimately make no difference whatsoever. Life support is futile for brain dead patients and shouldn’t even be considered as an option.