PATIENT TELLS APPEAL COURT TEST CASE: I CAN'T THINK OF A MORE HORRIFIC PROCESS

Don't let them condemn me to slow death in hospital bed

Monday 16th May 2005

A PATIENT with a degenerative brain disease today took his fight to be kept alive in hospital to the Appeal Court.

Leslie Burke, 45, suffers from cerebellar ataxia.

He recognises that the time will come when he could only receive food and water by tube.

Mr Burke is concerned that doctors may then decide it is not in his best interests to be kept alive artificially.

He fears that he could suffer an agonising death over up to three weeks from the pain and distress of dehydration and stavation.

He told three senior judges today: "I don't want to die of thirst in hospital." In July

BY PAUL CHESTON Courts Correspondent

last year he won a High Court ruling to stop doctors withdrawing treatment under GMC guidelines if his condition deteriorates. Today the GMC was appealing against the judge's decision,

Mr Burke's counsel, Richard Gordon QC. said: "He would want to be provided. with water and food until he dies of natural causes."

Before coming to court, Mr Burke, from Lancaster, said, "If I end up in hospital my communication skills will be negligible but my intelligence will be unimpaired. If

food and water were taken away it would take weeks for me to die. I would be aware of every minute of this and I would be unable to do anything about it.

"I cannot think of a more horrific process. There is no

'It would take weeks for me to die-..."

dignity in that. I am not asking for aggressive treatment I do not want my end to be hastened.

The GMC says that the guidelines were drawn up

after consultation with patients and disabled groups. The GMC believes that the High Court ruiling places doctors in "an impossibly difficult situation" and was not the correct interpretation of the law.

Philip Havers QC, representing the GMC, said the High Court ruling appeared to change the law and "alter in a fundamental way the nature of the relationship between doctor and patient". He added: A patient does not have a right to require the provision of any particular form of treatment.

"The doctor may recommend a particular option as the optimal treatment or the

one which best meets the patient's overall interests. The patient decides which option is in his or her best interests to accept.

"But what the patient cannot do is require the doctor to provide a particular form of treatment which the doctor does not consider to be elinically appropriate, for example because he believes it would be futile or actively harmful."

Mr Havers assured the court that Mr Burke "will not be prevented from receiving artificial feeding which he wïshes to be provided with when he requires it, hopefully many years hence".

The case continues.