I follow what you are saying and if the goal was simply to prolong life by 2 months than I would agree with for the most part.
But the following is a essentially a real-life senario. The patient requires an operation to resolve a major problem and normally the operation is performed without any problems, but in this case because of other medical problems he on medication that makes surgery almost impossible and can not be stopped cold-turkey (Normal survival rate for the surgery is 95% , but in his case would be about 10% without any other steps taken). However, there is a drug that will permit him to handle the symptoms of the new problem while being weaned off the medication which requires 6-7 weeks time. He can then have the surgery and restart the orignal medications (Survival rate would be about 70% because of damage to vital organs of the "new" prescription). The problem is the new medication can only be used for about 2 months before castropic failure of vital organs occur.
What would you do?? I know I would take the new medication, be weaned off the current drugs and have the operation.
As you can see, life threatening choices are not always easy, and some times painful choices are needed to deny that choice to anyone is not rational in my mind.
AI
