Death and the Research Imperative

For several years, there has been an awareness of the often harmful power of the “technological imperative” in the care of dying patients — that is, the compulsive use of technology to maintain life when palliative care would be more appropriate. There is another imperative that now deserves more attention in assessing the care of dying patients: the research imperative. It stems from the view that medicine has an almost sacred duty to combat all the known causes of death. Underlying this view is the assumption, usually tacit, that death is the principal evil of human life.At the heart . . .