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

纽约大学研究生Dwaipayan Banerjee将在Dr. Emily Martin的指导下，对经济约束、宗教信仰和各种医疗实践如何影响临终伦理和护理进行研究。他的研究将在印度进行，那里有三种不同的护理机构形式，可以进行比较案例研究。近年来，印度最高法院在宪法中的生命权是否可以理解为死亡权的问题上一直不一致。由于法律上的不确定性，印度私立医院的医生表示，他们允许的生命维持设备使用率几乎比世界上任何地方都要高。但除了私立医院，印度还有资源较为有限的公立医院；还有一种新的，较少医疗化的第三种选择，宗教和世俗的临终关怀。因此，印度为研究和创造一般理论提供了一个适当的背景，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不断变化的景观。这项研究将在德里的一些临终病人护理中心进行。研究人员将比较私人和公共医疗机构，以及宗教和世俗的临终关怀，研究这些不同的背景如何不同地塑造临终情况。他将采用适当的社会科学研究方法的组合。这将包括与医生的访谈、与病人家属的回顾性访谈、与医院和护理人员的访谈、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法发展的档案研究。这项研究的重要性在于，它将有助于对宗教、医学和文化背景之间关系的社会科学理解，通过这些文化背景，对人类尊严的理解，特别是在生命结束时，是形成的。它的部分贡献将是揭示宗教和文化差异对人的尊严的理解的影响，这种影响在临终决定期间更为明显和可观察到。这项研究的结果还将阐明日常护理实践对新道德和伦理理解的影响。资助这项研究也支持社会科学家的培训。

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.