Life, coma and euthanasia

Death was in every age a subject that has caused anxiety; it was always difficult to face this reality that, strictly speaking, is ineffable. In fact, one cannot have direct access to death: we cannot speak of it personally, because it is necessarily the death of the other person.
Modern medical knowledge has changed the concept of death: the concept of death that was understood as the cessation of breathing and / or cardiovascular arrest (“the last beat ") has changed to brain death, or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain.
The current resuscitation tools allow maintaining vital functions, even in the presence of extensive brain damages that eliminate consciousness. The brain death is established, according to law, when the signs of brain activity disappear for 6 hours. So it is no longer a moment: "the moment of transition" vanishes and becomes an event that lasts over time.
The underlying basis for this approach is the identification of death with the destruction of the brain as a whole, because it is the organ that presides over the entire body operation. The "brain death" indicates that, even if some vital function remains active (e.g. the heart beat), it is not integrated into an organic functional unity.
Once the brain death is confirmed, the law requires the suspension of artificial respiration and drugs that support the vital activities (heart, kidney, etc.).
The progress of resuscitation techniques made it possible to prolong the lives of patients in a state of irreversible coma, or with brain functions that are irretrievably compromised, so that the judiciary is often called in to adjudicate on interruption of artificially prolonged life.
Intensive care may artificially support the cardiac and respiratory functions, even when brain activity is absent. So an individual can be kept on the edge of life, making the demarcation line between life and death even more evanescent.
On the dignity of death, Pope Paul VI said: "... it is for the doctor to be at the service of life and support it until the end, without ever accepting euthanasia, nor give up the purely human duty to help life to take its course with dignity ". And against the aggressive treatment he said: "In many cases would it not be useless torture to impose resuscitation measures in the vegetative phase of an incurable disease? The duty of the doctor is to diminish the suffering, rather than using all possible means to extend it by prolonging a life that goes naturally to its conclusion“.
The aggressive treatment is defined as an extension of physical life that is not respectful of the dignity of the person; no one is morally obliged to use means to prolong a precarious and painful life. The right to refuse burdensome and disproportionate treatment is now widely recognized, and therefore not all doctors actions that shorten life fall under the definition of euthanasia.
Sprung, ethical intensive care physician said, "... do everything possible in the best interest of the patient can also mean not to start a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, but it can be to put a limit on treatment. The duty of the doctor is to try to prolong life, but also try not to prolong the process of dying“.
But for the limitation of care to be seen as an appropriate form of treatment, we must share what has been said by the philosopher Dunstan, "The success of resuscitation should not be measured only with the statistics of survival, as though each death were a failure. It must be measured by the quality of lives preserved or restored, by the quality of death of those for whom it is better to die, and by the quality of human relationships involved in every death ".