End of Life, Food, and Water: Ethical Standards of Care

Abstract

End-of-life care constitutes an important situation of extreme nutritional vulnerability for older adults. Feeding decisions in late-stage dementia often provoke moral and ethical questions for family members regarding whether or not to continue hand-feeding or opt for tube-feeding placement. Despite the knowledge that starvation and dehydration do not contribute to patient suffering at the end of life and in fact may contribute to a comfortable passage from life, the ethics of not providing artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) continue to be hotly debated. However, in the past two decades, voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) has moved from a palliative option of last resort to being increasingly recognized as a valid means to intentionally hasten death for cognitively intact persons dealing with a serious illness. Across many settings globally, when oral intake is deemed unsafe, decisions to withhold oral feeding and to forgo artificial means of providing nutrition are deemed to be ethically and legally sanctioned when the decision is made by a capable patient or their legally recognized substitute decision-maker. Decision-making at the end of life involves knowledge of and consideration of the legal, ethical, cultural, religious, and personal values involved in the issue at hand. This chapter attempted to illustrate the unique complexities when considering nutrition therapy (by oral and artificial means) at the end of life.