The Use of Palliative Sedation for Terminally Ill Patients: Review of the Literature and an Argumentative Essay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Palliative sedation for terminally ill patients, with a life expectancy of less than two weeks to control patients’ intolerable pain and symptoms, is an intervention that raises many legal and ethical controversial issues. The purpose of this paper is to write an argumentative essay to support the use of palliative sedation for terminally ill patients, taking into consideration the legal and ethical points of view of opponents and proponents. Although it is illegal in some countries such as France, Jordan and New-Zealand, palliative sedation for terminally ill patients is legally sound for other countries such as USA, Canada, Sweden, Belgium, and Netherlands. Ethically, opponents consider palliative sedation for terminally ill patients as a misleading concept as it hastens death and negatively influences patients’ family members, and it may be misused by health team members. Whereas, proponents debate that palliative sedation is a multidisciplinary intervention that should be considered as a last resort for terminally ill patients with the main intention of relieving patients’ agony and having no effect on patients’ survival; moreover, it positively influences patients’ family members. The author is encouraged to support the use of palliative sedation as it is a multidisciplinary judgement which guarantees that any decision made is built on the latest evidence-based guidelines and is ethically accepted according to the principles of beneficence, autonomy, and doctrine of double effect. Additionally, it is the last and only intervention to alleviate patients’ suffering without affecting patients’ survival, thus causing family members to accept the use of palliative sedation for their loved ones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".