Solicitude towards patients at the end of their lives out of humanitarianism, has always been and will always be a sacred and bound duty of medical science and medical workers, which gives the patients warmth, esteem and sympathy, stresses their life qualities, respects their wills, and also supplies a prerequisite for developing terminal care as part of routine work in hospital treatment and for developing family medicine combined with community science on a primary health care basis. Some people believe that euthanasia can be substituted by terminal care, thus solving many problems. They think terminal care more acceptable and suitable than euthanasia. This perspective simplifies the problem. Both of them respect the life quality, life values and dignity of patients approaching life-end.
People encounter problems with policies and techniques when they carry out terminal care.
It is more complicated to perform euthanasia because many ethical, social, legal problems caused by the relationships between individual and society, value and dignity, science and knowledge, life quantity and life quality, are voluntariness and involuntariness, directness and indirectness, actively and passively, have to be answered. We are confronted with a comprehensive ethical problem relevant to our outlook on death, ethics, and medical values, which does not appear in the case of the terminal care. Developing the cause of terminal care cannot take the place of exploration of euthanasia for of medical science, socio-cultural, and legal reasons. Also terminal care cannot solve problems that are related to euthanasia regarding life quality in social medicine, and the reasonable utilization of resources in health economics, and cannot decide whether patients approaching life-end should choose death or senseless survival with mental and physical suffering. Even the best hospice can not remove the extreme pain suffered by dying patients.