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?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

The difference between this and “Physician Assisted Suicide” is that you are already **actively** dying. There is no saving the person. There is only prolonging the death. Hospice is about making this as painless as possible.

Physician assisted suicide is **actively** ending the life. Imagine someone in the exact same condition as the hospice patient… and instead of giving them painkillers the doctor gave them poison. That would be assisted suicide. Hospice is about letting the body perform the dying naturally. It doesn’t speed it along at all (assisted suicide) but it doesn’t try to stop it… which would only fail and cause the dying process to last much longer anyway.