The Role of the Physician in Caring for Patients Pursuing VSED: Challenging the Conventional Approach.
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2025-12
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The conventional approach to caring for patients pursuing voluntarily stopping of eating and drinking (VSED) allows physicians to disagree with the patient's decisions to pursue VSED, but it assumes clinicians should accept the patient's choice and provide all aspects of supportive care after the patient has autonomously elected to pursue VSED. We argue this conventional approach problematically ignores the problem of complicity with what some physicians take to be an unethical action. We propose an alternative approach that makes space for clinicians opposed to VSED to advise against this course of action, and to provide palliative medicine while resisting interventions that facilitate VSED.
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Frush, Benjamin W, Farr A Curlin and Daniel P Sulmasy (2025). The Role of the Physician in Caring for Patients Pursuing VSED: Challenging the Conventional Approach. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 73(12). pp. 3844–3848. 10.1111/jgs.70195 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34822.
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Benjamin Wade Frush
Farr A Curlin
Farr Curlin, MD, is Josiah Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, & History of Medicine and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin has worked to bring attention to the intersection of medicine, ethics, and theology. In 2012 he helped to found both the University of Chicago’s Program on Medicine and Religion and the annual Conference on Medicine and Religion. Since 2015, through Duke Divinity School’s TMC Initiative, he and colleagues have brought graduate theological training to those with vocations to health care. Starting in 2023, Dr. Curlin also is working with colleagues across North America to develop the Hippocratic Society, an association of students and practitioners dedicated to fulfilling the profession to heal. He is co-author, with Chris Tollefsen, of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame University Press, 2021), as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters addressing the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice.
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