Feeding Tubes, Defibrillators and Medical Ethics

Feeding Tubes, Defibrillators and Medical Ethics

Let’s begin with two stories about the growing and important field of bioethics. The first is from Ryan Pferdehirt, the newly named Flanigan Chair in Bioethics at the Kansas City-based Center for Practical Bioethics. A hospital once asked him to consult on a bioethics case in which a son thought his desperately ill, hospitalized mother was starving. The son insisted that she be fed through a feeding tube. But Pferdehirt knew that in her conditio…