Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care, Part 3

This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death. 

The Bible says in  Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

The featured quote for this episode is from Ernest Hemingway. He said, "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

Our topic for today is titled "Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care (Part 3)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll. 

--- Miracle Makers 

Despite the opportunities of gradual dying, some Christian thinkers and theologians have tended to focus on the challenging questions of bioethics—how and when to apply or withdraw medical technology. At the same time, individual Christians have often placed their hope in the effectiveness of medical therapies to delay death. 

Gradual dying means we must be ever wiser regarding our use of medical treatments, particularly when these interventions are designed to treat sudden emergencies such as car accidents and heart attacks, not necessarily diseases of old age. While CPR, ventilators or radical surgery may be appropriate for an otherwise healthy fifty-year-old man who happens to have clogged arteries, the procedures may not be wise on a frail eighty-five-year-old. 

Or they might be. The use of medicine to cure or slow the advance of a disease can be a compelling and effective option amid the uncertainty of an elderly person's long decline. 

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