The LCP again

I blogged about the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying a while ago (Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found here) and basically concluded that in itself it wasn't necessarily bad, but that it's application was likely to be problematic at best.

 

It seems that the recent inquiry (as reported by the BBC) highlights some of these problems more specifically. The fact that there is a financial incentive to use the LCP is an obviously disastrous initiative likely to lead to patients being innapproriately placed on the pathway and, in some cases, deliberately euthanised.

 

The comments of the medical student is also merits consideration. She says that "in medical school we focus so much on saving lives that dying is put to one side". I constantly read headlines about prevent deaths from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, we want to prevent deaths from it. But as finite creatures, death is an inescapable part of reality. As Christians, we know that it is our ordinary route of entry to eternal life. It is bizarre (or perhaps not) that the heady combination of atheistic humanism and aggressive secularism we now see is not sure whether to eliminate suffering by preventing death or to eliminate suffering by eliminating all those who suffer. While we live in a world which labours under the consequences of original sin and is in a state of journeying towards perfection, we experience both moral and physical evil and therefore neither of these contradicting so-called solutions can achieve its aim. The desire to do so shows that the problem is still the same: the desire to ignore our limited nature and be gods without God.