Li Li Bin
Crit Care. 2013 Dec 4;17(6):244. doi: 10.1186/cc13140.
Critical care medicine in China has made great advances in recent decades. This has led to an unavoidable issue: end-of-life ethics. With advances in medical technology and therapeutics allowing the seemingly limitless maintenance of life, the exact time of death of an individual patient is often determined by the decision to limit life support. How to care for patients at the end of life is not only a medical problem but also a social, ethical, and legal issue. A lot of factors, besides culture, come into play in determining a person's ethical attitudes or behaviors, such as experience, education, religion, individual attributes, and economic considerations. Chinese doctors face ethical problems similar to those of their Western counterparts; however, since Chinese society is different from that of Western countries in cultural traditions, customs, religious beliefs, and ethnic backgrounds, there is a great difference between China and the Western world in regard to ethics at the end of life, and there is also a huge controversy within China.
近几十年来，中国的重症医学取得了巨大进展。这引发了一个不可避免的问题：临终伦理。随着医疗技术和治疗手段的进步，生命似乎能够得到无限期维持，个体患者的确切死亡时间往往取决于限制生命支持的决定。如何照顾临终患者不仅是一个医学问题，也是一个社会、伦理和法律问题。除文化外，许多因素，如经验、教育、宗教、个人特质和经济考量等，都会影响一个人的伦理态度或行为。中国医生面临着与西方同行类似的伦理问题；然而，由于中国社会在文化传统、习俗、宗教信仰和民族背景方面与西方国家不同，在临终伦理方面，中国与西方世界存在很大差异，并且在中国国内也存在巨大争议。
