Challenges in End-of-Life Care

It may seem rhetorical discussing an issue as universal and certain as human mortality. However, death is still the source of an enormous amount of ethical dilemmas and uncertainty in clinical decision-making regarding whether to withdraw and withhold care in terminal illnesses. Modern society is trying to approach and to standardize the dying process, while sometimes failing to recognize that it is an unpreventable and unavoidable phenomenon. Reliable and valid research on attitudes toward dying and death is surprisingly limited to academic debate and selected literature.