When Palliative Medicine Is Culturalized

The paper elaborates from the perspective of QOL (quality of life), humanistic care and bioethics, the difficulties and problems of the clinical treatment for patients with advanced cancer. Based on a comparative study of the view of life and death between the Christian Culture and the Confucius Culture, it aims at finding a brand new way of thinking to confirm that there are merits in both cultures so far as humanistic care for the dying men is concerned and those merits may contribute to a practical Chinese hospice model.The paper also discusses humanism—the essence of Confucianism. It holds that Chinese culture, though strongly influenced by primitive atheism, is easy to admit and absorb the foreign culture, religion and customs, as is attested by its civilization of thousands of years.As for the dying patients, the humanistic view of life plays the roles of wisdom, ethics and logics.Those functions, being the common spiritual wealth of human beings, are instructive to a good palliative and hospice practice model.With a detailed analysis of filial piety—the essence of traditional Chinese culture, the paper explains the necessity and feasibility for the construction of a "love" model for the dying patients based on Chinese atheistic ethics and morals. After that it delves into the "charity" model of the Christian theology and through a comparative study on the two models confirms that the filial piety, by nature, serves as an emotional link between human beings.It embodies the humanistic care too.Furthermore, the paper advocates developing and improving the idea of traditional "filial piety" by getting rid of its authoritarian element and extremeness. "Eight Honors,Eight Disgraces" is the instructive principles for the moral constructions from the angle of the national moral ideology. Nevertheless there is a little pity in it, that is the filial piety(one of the eight traditional Chinese virtues, the other seven is sincerity, faithfulness, propriety, righteousness, loyalty, cleanness and the sense of shame) is neglected. In my opinion, it would be better if we could elevate the significance of "filial piety" from that of the social ethics to one of the governing rules of the country and take it as a priority in the construction of our national morals. It also proposes to carry out the palliative and hospice care on the premise of the construction and extension of family ethics.The extension of family ethics, which may be defined as social ethics, mainly refers to the extension of one's love and responsibility from his family members to other people in the society. What's more, hospice care can not be carried out in a culture regarding death as a taboo since the hospice itself is a process of confronting death. Therefore, what have been discussed in the paper—to experience death first, to confront death, to formulate proper view of life and death are the prerequisite for the implementation and popularization of thanatology studies and life education in China as well.Those are also discussed in the paper. In the context of economic globalization, esp. Under the current reformation of Chinese medical structure,a re-examination of the western hospice model and ethic norms derived from the Christian Civilization is helpful to the reconstruction of medical ethics in our country and the rapid localization of those ideas.