Tribune. Thursday March 17, the President of the Republic and candidate Emmanuel Macron presented his program. Among a large number of measures proposed, he expressed his wish to consult the French in order to answer the questions which arise on the end of life. This citizen consultation project would aim to “don’t give in to any shortcuts” faced with situations “human and ethical irreducible”to which the French Society for Support and Palliative Care (SFAP) fully subscribes.
Every day, the 10,000 caregivers that the SFAP represents experience these always unique situations alongside patients and their families. Faced with the imminence of death, each patient or caregiver is confronted with existential questions. Why the disease? Why death? Why this impotence in the face of an inevitable outcome? No law can or should answer these questions. On the other hand, the law can guarantee everyone the best conditions to get through this ordeal that is constitutive of our humanity.
For more than twenty years, this is what the French legislator has endeavored to do, often with difficulty, sometimes with fear, but always respecting the balance. Three major laws – Kouchner in 1999, Leonetti in 2005, Claeys-Leonetti in 2016 – have drawn a singular and respectful path, based on the freedom of the patient and the refusal of relentlessness, equal conditions of access to care palliatives and the fraternity between the dying person, those who take care of him and his entourage who accompany him. The fruit of long and detailed deliberative processes, these texts are distinguished by their indifference to political calculations and by their great respect for the diversity of situations and people. These three laws send a collective message to all sick people: you matter to our society and we will do everything possible to relieve you “whatever the cost”.
Palliative medicine was born in France from this democratic will, taking over from pioneering initiatives. Its objective and its practices are revolutionizing the world of health and constitute great progress for our society. Palliative medicine is not attached to the pathology, but to the person. It is not a technical speciality, but a set of practices and meetings, medical, paramedical and extra-medical, organized with the sole purpose of offering the patient and his entourage maximum well-being and a minimum of suffering at the approach of death. Palliative medicine is a revolution of humility for the medical world and for our society. It does not seek technical performance or to postpone death at all costs, but rather to support and care for the person to enable him to live with dignity until the end of his life. In this sense, it reinforces our medical ethics, based on the Hippocratic oath: ” I will do everything to soothe the pain. I do not unreasonably prolong the agony. I never deliberately provoke death. »
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