Abstract
In this chapter, the author addresses the necessity to recognize Palliative Care as a human right, which means to endow it with two essential characteristics: its enforceability, that is, the punishability of those acts that ignore and/or skip it: and its universality regardless of individual conditions of people. Hence, the State must be the guarantor not only of the right to health but of the complete state of well-being as referred by the World Health Organization . Her conclusion is that denying palliative care to a patient , or not contemplating it as a certain and appropriate option in the health care system, imputes to the State a particular international responsibility , with consequent sanctions that could be applied.
The unreasonable failure to treat pain is poor medicine, unethical practice, and is an abrogation of a fundamental human right.
Marguet Somerville
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Notes
- 1.
Shortly before the 1992 elections, Bush was considered unbeatable by most political analysts, primarily because of his foreign policy successes, such as the end of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War; his popularity had then reached 90% acceptance, a historic record. In these circumstances, James Carville, a strategist in Bill Clinton’s election campaign, said that he should focus on issues more closely related to the daily lives of citizens and their immediate needs. In order to keep the campaign focused on a message, Carville hit a sign in the headquarters with three written points:
– Change versus more of the same
– The economy , stupid
– Do noy forget the health system
Although the billboard was only an internal reminder, the phrase became a kind of unofficial slogan of the Clinton campaign, which was instrumental in changing the balance of power and defeating Bush, something unthinkable shortly before
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Aizenberg, M. (2019). Palliative Cares as Human Rights: A Justification in the Light of Biolaw. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_20
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