Islamic Goals for Clinical Treatment at the End of Life: The Concept of Accountability Before God (<i>Taklīf</i>) Remains Useful: Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Ethical Obligations and Clinical Goals in End-of-Life Care: Deriving a Quality-of-Life Construct Based on the Islamic Concept of Accountability Before God (<i>Taklīf</i>)”

The ever-increasing technological advances of modern medicine have increased physicians' capacity to carry out a wide array of clinical interventions near the end-of-life. These new procedures have resulted in new "types" of living where a patient's cognitive functions are severely diminished although many physiological functions remain active. In this biomedical context, patients, surrogate decision-makers, and clinicians all struggle with decisions about what clinical interventions to pursue and when therapeutic intent should be replaced with palliative goals of care. For some patients and clinicians, religious teachings about the duty to seek medical care and the care of the dying offer ethical guidance when faced with such choices. Accordingly, this paper argues that traditional Sunni Islamic ethico-legal views on the obligation to seek medical care and Islamic theological concepts of human dignity (karāmah) and inviolability (ḥurmah) provide the ethical grounds for non-intervention at the end-of-life and can help calibrate goals of care discussions for Muslim patients. In closing the paper highlights the pressing need to develop a holistic ethics of healthcare of the dying from an Islamic perspective that brings together multiple genres of the Islamic intellectual tradition so that it can meet the needs of the patients, clinicians and Muslim religious leaders interacting with the healthcare system.

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Allied Muslim Healthcare Professional Perspectives on Death by Neurologic Criteria

Lewis

Kitamura

Padela

2020

Neurocrit Care

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Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Islamic Perspectives on Clinical Intervention Near the End of Life: We Can but Must We?

Islamic Perspectives on Clinical Intervention Near the End of Life: We Can but Must We?

Islamic perspectives on clinical intervention near the end-of-life: We can but must we?

Allied Muslim Healthcare Professional Perspectives on Death by Neurologic Criteria

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