Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cultural, Economic, and Technological Contexts of End-of-Life Care

纽约大学研究生Dwaipayan Banerjee将在艾米丽·马丁博士的指导下，研究经济约束、宗教信仰和多变的医疗实践如何影响临终伦理和护理。他的研究将在印度进行，在那里，三种不同的护理机构形式的存在使比较案例研究成为可能。近年来，在宪法中的生命权是否可以理解为死亡的权利的问题上，印度最高法院一直存在矛盾。由于法律的不确定性，印度私立医院的医生表示，他们允许的生命支持使用率比世界上几乎任何地方都要高。但除了私立医院，印度还提供了公立医院，那里的资源更加有限；此外，还有一种新的、医疗化程度较低的第三种选择，即宗教和世俗临终关怀。因此，印度为研究和创建一般理论提供了适当的背景，以了解社会、经济和文化因素如何影响临终关怀伦理和决策的变化。这项研究将在德里的一些临终病人护理地点进行。研究人员将比较私营和公共卫生保健机构以及宗教和世俗临终关怀机构，研究这些不同的背景如何以不同的方式塑造临终情况。他将采用适当的社会科学研究方法的组合。这些研究将包括对医生的采访，对患者家属的回顾采访，对医院和护理人员的采访，在临终关怀和重症监护地点的观察，以及关于殖民和后殖民时期临终遗产法发展的档案研究。这项研究的重要性在于，它将有助于社会科学理解宗教、医学和文化背景之间的关系，通过这些文化背景，人们对人类尊严的理解，特别是在生命结束时的理解。它的部分贡献将是揭示宗教和文化差异对对人的尊严的理解的影响，这一点更容易辨别，并可在临终决定期间观察。这项研究的发现还将阐明日常护理实践对新的道德和伦理理解的出现的影响。资助这项研究还支持对一名社会科学家的培训。

New York University graduate student Dwaipayan Banerjee, under the supervision of Dr. Emily Martin, will undertake research on how economic constraints, religious beliefs, and variable medical practices affect end-of-life ethics and care. His research will be conducted in India where the presence of three different institutional forms of care make possible a comparative case study. In recent years, the Indian Supreme Court has been inconsistent on the question of whether the right to life in the constitution can be understood as the right to die. Because of this context of legal uncertainty, doctors at private hospitals in India suggest that they allow a higher rate of life-support use than almost anywhere in the world. But in addition to private hospitals, India offers public hospitals, where resources are more limited; and a new, less medicalized third option of religious and secular hospice care. Thus India provides an appropriate context for studying and creating general theory to understand how social, economic, and cultural factors affect the changing landscape of end-of-life care ethics and decision making. The research will be carried out at some of these sites of care for the terminally ill in Delhi. The researcher will compare private and public health care facilities as well as religious and secular hospices, examining how these varied contexts differently shape end-of-life situations. He will employ a combination of appropriate social science research methods. These will include interviews with doctors, retrospective interviews with patient families, interviews with hospital and nursing staff, observations at hospice and intensive-care sites, and archival research on the colonial and post-colonial development of end-of-life law.The importance of this research is that it will contribute to the social scientific understanding of the relationship between religion, medicine, and the cultural contexts through which understandings of human dignity, particularly at the end of life, are shaped. Part of its contribution will be to reveal the effects of religious and cultural differences on understandings of human dignity, which is more discernible and available to observation during end-of-life decisions. Findings from this research also will elucidate the effects of everyday practices of care giving on the emergence of new moral and ethical understandings. Funding this research also supports the training of a social scientist.