In addition, such care can include the administration of medications in dosages large enough to keep the patient free from pain.
To be sure this is clear. Palliative care is care whose sole purpose is to make the person feel more comfortable, e.g., painkilling drugs, hydration, etc. Sometimes palliative care can, itself, be life-threatening. Painkillers can depress respiration, for example, and when it takes high doses to kill pain, it might also kill the patient. Even hydration, as with a person who has congestive heart failure, could be life-shortening.
Sometimes, at a point, there is a thin line between doing things that make the patient more comfortable and doing things that might shorten his life. The point of the statement is that one may, and even should, opt for those things that increase comfort, if the purpose of the administrator is to increase comfort, even if those measures are perilous.
There would always be a balance to such things.
The “disinterest” is a little harder, but it would be my impression that the administrator ought not to have some ulterior motive, e.g., precisely to shorten the person’s life because the person is a burden. The administrator, in other words, is walking the thin line in order to achieve the result of palliation only.
There is a strange scene in “Saving Private Ryan” when the medic is shot in the liver. He is administered morphine in what we might conclude is the standard dose sufficient to relieve pain. He then asks for more, and is given what appears to be a triple dose. The actors exchange “knowing glances” and the officer approves. It has the appearance of an assisted suicide, though the scene is ambiguous. In that situation, one assumes the “interest” is not palliative, but aiding a hopelessly wounded person to die prematurely simply because he wants to die immediately of a drug overdose rather than perhaps more slowly by bleeding to death.
