Sir, The Government has at last come clean over its position on giving doctors the authority to withhold food and fluid from patients, dying or not, simply because they deem it inappropriate (report, May 19). It is to save costs. Leslie Burke seeks only not to be starved and dehydrated to death — nothing more. The legal problem has arisen solely because food and fluids have been defined as “treatment” (originally in the case of Tony Bland).

Food and fluids are not treatment, merely ordinary care (though the provision of a convenient route for their administration may require a relatively minor intervention). They do not cure any disease but are essential to all of us if our body is to maintain life.

Unless a patient is dying and the administration of food and fluids is itself burdensome, no doctor has the right, or the omniscience, to deem a patient’s future life not worth living and to withdraw these simple measures.

Yours faithfully,
IAN JESSIMAN,
17 Grange Drive,
Chislehurst, Kent BR7 5ES.
May 19.

From Mr Andrew Calvert

Sir, How can a professional or service provider dare to say that “decisions over treatment were for doctors, not patients”? The reason is that medicine is a service provided to us “free”, for which we should just shut up and be grateful. The financing of the health service has thus distorted its whole ethos.

In every other area of life we take advice and then make the purchase decision ourselves, somehow, in our ignorance, managing to balance a host of factors that matter to us rather than to the provider.

Yours faithfully,
ANDREW CALVERT,
The Counting House,
Mount Beacon Place, Bath BA1 5SP.
md@arjc.net
May 19.

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