eli5: Patients in hospice care are often unconscious due to high doses of sedative drugs, and are given no intravenous fluids, which leads to death by dehydration. Why is this done? Is there any difference between this and physician-assisted suicide?
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The body gets really mad when something is wrong, which is normally a good thing because it tells us to go to the doctor. When the doctor can’t fix the problem, medicine shushes those angry signals so they can rest and enjoy what time they have, kind of like snoozing an alarm.
Some people need lots of medicine to be comfortable, many need very little. Hospice helps find that sweet spot of comfy but not knocked out, and most of the time it is based on the patient and family’s preference.
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