Forgoing Treatment in Terminal Cancer Patients Is an Act of Humanitarianism

When cancer reaches its terminal stage, every form of treatment can only achieve limited effect; the hope of raising the dead is slim. Yet many families still refuse to give up, still hope to cure the patient, and travel everywhere seeking doctors and consultations.

In the past, whenever I encountered such situations, I would always persuade the family to abandon treatment, because from the standpoint of evidence-based medicine, continuing treatment is meaningless: it not only wastes money but also inflicts suffering on the patient. Traumatic treatments in particular make the patient's life a misery. However, patients and their families often hold the mentality of "treating a dead horse as a live one," refusing to abandon every hopeless therapy. This often gives fraudsters an opening, while also inflicting deeply inhumane harm on the patient's body.

At the final moment of my own mother's life, I was calm. Perhaps, relying on modern science and on my own medical skill, I could have found a way to let her live a few more months. But those extra months, aside from the deepest suffering, would have had little meaning. I knew she would be tormented by all kinds of agonies and finally pass away in pain.

So over these years, although I have grieved that my mother could not be saved, I also feel comforted that she did not suffer too much. Two days before she died, she was still able to go out and watch people play cards; her passing from this world came almost suddenly. She did not endure the more severe torments that most cancer patients suffer in the final stage of life. For both her and our family, this was the greatest consolation.

Before my father-in-law passed away, I personally removed the gastric tube and oxygen mask inserted in his body. I was both his son-in-law and a physician who had stayed by his side until the last moment. Seeing that he had no hope of recovery, I could not bear to watch him endure this final ordeal of life. My father-in-law died with a smile; he was the most free-and-easy person I have ever seen in facing his own death.

Nowadays I often have to face patients and families making a final struggle in despair. When they come to ask my opinion, I sometimes speak bluntly, persuading them to abandon any resuscitative treatment and let the patient end life naturally as soon as possible, because in my personal experience this is the option that makes the patient suffer the least.

But such advice is not easily accepted. So later I gradually only say such things to those patient families who trust me completely, because those who do not trust me would feel that a physician making such a suggestion is extraordinarily cruel.

My aunt (my father's cousin's wife) suffered a sudden stroke. When I hurried back to visit her, she was already in the ICU of Hubei Provincial People's Hospital, unable to breathe on her own, sustained by various precision medical instruments maintaining her basic vital signs. I strongly urged my cousin to abandon this expensive and cruel treatment, but he believed it would be unfilial and insisted on continuing. In the end, my aunt suffered greatly and finally passed away half a month later.

We Chinese have a spirit of foolish filial piety, which often develops to an irrational degree. Such foolish filial piety is not worth encouraging. Reverence for the laws of nature and respect for life itself require us to think more from a humanitarian standpoint rather than from near-ignorant notions of filial duty.