Medical Technologies Create New Ethical Quandaries at the End-of-Life

The Washington Post wrote an article last week about the new ethical dilemmas created by advances in medical technologies. Specifically, heart pumps known as left ventricular assist devices (LVADs), which were originally developed as a bridge technology to organ transplant, but now are also used for years in patients. The article discusses the different ways physicians and ethicists view the device, from being similar to feeding tubes and the like which a patient has the right to remove, to being more comparable to an organ itself.