AS A retired nurse, I was intrigued by the letter you published last week about Mr Noel Conrad, whose symptoms were, as reported by his wife, uncontrolled by conventional medicine during the final six months of his life until the Palliative Care team became involved.

Is there a lesson in this?

The other lobby which considers that it has an unquestionable ‘right’ to declaim on the ‘euthanasia debate’ is that purporting to represent disabled people: notwithstanding the fact that the debate concerning voluntary euthanasia is entirely divorced from the needs of disabled people.

However, the reason we need to have this debate lies in what has happened to medicine itself over the past century.

In 2014, eight years after having suffered two serious strokes (eight years during which he never regained consciousness), the late Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, was finally ‘allowed’ to die.

Medicine has become perverted from the ‘art’ of the relief of suffering, to the ‘science’ of the cure of death!

Perhaps the impetus for this perverse process lies with us. We simply refuse to get out of the way of succeeding generations.

We are presently learning, from daily news reports, that acute situations are unable to be handled by our NHS because of the sheer numbers of ‘bed-blockers’ (ghastly term, used to describe chronically-ill, frequently very elderly people) who are unable to be discharged.

This situation is also highly political. Why is it that there is plenty of money to spend on maintaining an army in a foreign field thousands of miles from the UK, but insufficient funding to care for those who have contributed to our coffers over the decades, and who now need our care?

Of course, there was a time when we had a concept of the ‘common good’ in the UK. For various reasons, we lost that conception over the decades and we have never recovered it. All we do is indulge in vacuous ‘virtue-signalling’ and increasingly distrust our political class.

MARK DYER
Wellington