Abstract
Critical care medicine in China has made great advances in recent decades. This has led to an unavoidable issue: end-of-life ethics. With advances in medical technology and therapeutics allowing the seemingly limitless maintenance of life, the exact time of death of an individual patient is often determined by the decision to limit life support. How to care for patients at the end of life is not only a medical problem but also a social, ethical, and legal issue. A lot of factors, besides culture, come into play in determining a person’s ethical attitudes or behaviors, such as experience, education, religion, individual attributes, and economic considerations. Chinese doctors face ethical problems similar to those of their Western counterparts; however, since Chinese society is different from that of Western countries in cultural traditions, customs, religious beliefs, and ethnic backgrounds, there is a great difference between China and the Western world in regard to ethics at the end of life, and there is also a huge controversy within China.
Highlights
China has made great socioeconomic advances in the past 30 years, and more and more hospitals have established a modern ICU, resulting in an obvious reduction of mortality of critically ill patients [1,2]
It is an inescapable fact that limiting life support is sometimes necessary and acceptable in patients who are hopelessly critically ill [4,5,6]
With advances in medical technology allowing the seemingly limitless maintenance of life, the exact time of death of an individual patient is often determined by the decision to limit life support
Summary
China has made great socioeconomic advances in the past 30 years, and more and more hospitals have established a modern ICU, resulting in an obvious reduction of mortality of critically ill patients [1,2]. Critical care is an integral part of hospital care, and the ICU is a setting where patients are given the most technologically advanced life-sustaining treatments. This article will discuss general aspects surrounding these ethics and the end-oflife care for critically ill patients in China, and, where possible, special reference will be given to known international/cultural differences.
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