In one case, a man's life support was unplugged before his sons were informed.
Of thousands of complaints at national health hospitals, a staggering majority of those investigated involved elderly patients.
Bellieni pointed out a study published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association” in 2000 further emphasized the point. Results of a survey showed that in a number of western nations, “the majority of doctors think that life with neurological disability, but also with a serious physical handicap is worse than death.”
This perspective, he said, is a “sign of a cultural wound, a profound moral discomfort that shows the disability not as something to overcome, but something intolerable, towards which one feels aversion, not compassion.”
Solutions are being sought for how to help them die and not for how to help them live better, he said.
“The issue of death with dignity is not how to rush it, but how to conquer pain and solitude,” said the doctor. “But a climate of terror towards a potential and improbable persistence of keeping (people) alive has been scientifically created.”
In the world today, “a generation of scared people” is being created that “only knows how to seek ways to defend themselves, to run for shelter, flee, looking at death as the last desperate consolation, because life has ultimately lost (its) meaning and attraction.”
This perspective leads people to seek “exit strategies” for lives that have become “cumbersome” to them, he explained.
Bellieni asserted that the “abandonment of the elderly ... is not a problem of malpractice but of cultural discomfort in the face of the sick ... as long as they are living.”