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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Once your kidneys shut down when your body is dying, fluids are not gonna help really. If you end up just forcing fluids into a person who can’t balance it out. That just ends up leaving the bloodstream and going somewhere else.
The body gets very swollen, the skin tears very easily, their skin leaks fluid, the lungs get filled and the person can’t breathe, and they have so many secretions they are choking on their own saliva.
It’s not necessarily in someone’s best interest to get overloaded with fluids if there already is nothing more to do.
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