Clinically, virtual reality (VR) applications can be used to control pain and to treat psychological disorders. Christians should be attentive to issues of embodiment and excarnation when approaching this technology. At the end of life, VR can help mend one’s relationship to one’s body and promote relationships of care and love between persons. Negatively, VR can be depersonalizing if it alienates a patient from the flesh world. However, VR can help a patient towards a good death as a pain relief adjunct when used within a caring community.
Tag Archives: palliative care
Revisiting Physician-Assisted Suicide: Reaffirming the Christian Hippocratic Legacy
Support for physician-assisted suicide is growing as a result of ever-expanding cultural pressure. Healthcare professionals should oppose this trend and recognize that physician-assisted suicide is a misguided answer to human suffering. For 25 centuries, the Hippocratic Oath has served as the ultimate credo of the medical professional, and serves as a more trustworthy guide for professional ethics than contemporary culture. In this essay, I reflect on the Hippocratic Oath from a Christian perspective and reaffirm that physician-assisted suicide, despite growing in cultural acceptance, remains a misled answer to human suffering and as such is dangerous for the profession of medicine. Physician-assisted suicide corrupts the medical profession, relies on a distorted view of autonomy, and subverts true compassion. The way forward for the medical professional, in contrast, is an ethic of a “good death” comprised of healing, palliative care, and true compassion.