Under this circumstances, it is not wise and practical that many hospice organizations are starting up and growing in some big and medium-sized cities at too high cost in man power and material resources, with new Hospices being set up, new wards for terminal care being adding, and qualified medical staff being provided. This is very likely to lead to new waste and be a minus with regard to medical resources and financial investment. As far as terminal care itself is concerned, its function and its influence are undoubtedly limited. We should contain the causes of terminal care within a certain scope even if it is to be a part of the scheduled development of Chinese health care. 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.