Many people on feeding tubes or who recieve IV nutrients often have bodies that are capable of sustaining themselves (even if they aren’t in perfect health) without other interference. To deprive such people of a feeding tube is equivalent to depriving anyone else with an otherwise self-sustaining body of food, and thereby starving them to death. It is perhaps twice as bad, because a person who cannot feed him or herself is usually one who is relatively helpless compared to a healthy person.
If we are not morally obligated to feed those who cannot feed themselves, then we are no more obligated to give our babies a bottle, than we are to give a feeding tube to our elderly grandmothers.
I hope I never live (or die) in a world that would place so little value on human life as to deprive me of food simply because I could not put it in my mouth and swallow it on my own power.
I have done a lot of research on this subject in the last hour, and the more doctors study the issue of end stage dementia, more and more are recommending NOT giving these patients feeding tubes.
Here’s an excerpt from first things magazine
Alzheimer’s dementia is the most common type of brain deterioration, afflicting five percent of individuals over sixty-five and perhaps as many as 50 percent of those over eighty-five. It is manifested by progressive cognitive impairment, followed by physical deterioration. This process generally takes several years, often a decade, and is ultimately fatal. In its final stages it almost always interferes with the patient’s ability to swallow. Eventually the individual chokes on even pureed foods or liquids. Continued attempts at feeding by mouth very commonly result in aspiration of food or fluid into the airway, frequently leading to pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia will sometimes respond to antibiotics, but other times it leads to death. Such respiratory infections are the most common final event in this progressive disease.
Feeding tubes have been commonly used in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. The reasoning has been that this patient is not able to take in adequate fluids and nutrition and he is not imminently dying. Several assumptions then follow: a feeding tube will improve his comfort, will prevent aspiration pneumonia, and will ensure adequate nutrition which will in turn prevent skin breakdown and thus postpone his death. However, empirical evidence, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999, has shown each of these assumptions to be incorrect: using a feeding tube in a patient with dementia does not prevent these complications, nor does it prolong life.
In addition, there are several negative aspects to using a feeding tube in a person with advanced cognitive impairment. There are rare complications during insertion, some merely uncomfortable, some quite serious. Having a tube in one’s nose is generally uncomfortable; even having one coiled up under a dressing on the abdominal wall can be annoying. Because the demented patient doesn’t understand the intended purpose of the feeding tube, he or she may react by trying to remove it, requiring either repeated re-insertions or the use of hand restraints. In addition, using a feeding tube may deprive the patient of human presence and interaction: hanging a bag of nutritional fluid takes only a few seconds, as opposed to the extended time of human contact involved in feeding a cognitively impaired person.
There is a slowly developing consensus in medicine that feeding tubes are generally not appropriate for use in most patients nearing the end stage of Alzheimer’s disease. This belief can be supported from a moral standpoint in terms of proportionality. And yet feeding tubes are still rather commonly used. A recently published review of all U.S. nursing home patients with cognitive impairment found that an average of 34 percent were being fed with feeding tubes (though there were large state-to-state variations, from nine percent in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to 64 percent in Washington, D.C.).
